Oaxaca: the Power and the Glory

Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun begins with the lines: “‘Oaxaca’ is pronounced ‘Wahaka.’ Originally the hotel where we were staying had been the Convent of Santa Catalina. The first thing we noticed was a painting in a little room leading to the bar. The bar was called Las Novicias.” This same building, the Quinta Real, was the starting point for Giorgio Antei’s trip through the Mixteca region with Massimo Listri. The two men were determined to recreate an Italian jaunt through the homeland of one of the great peoples of precolonial and colonial Mexico. The name of the Mixtec echoes through that land’s history along with that of the Olmec, the Toltec, and the Aztec (it rhymes as well!). Their journey combined heroic helpings of aromatic and spicy banquets, folk devotionals, nuns with hairshirts and barbed garter belts, Baroque Dominican preachers, and far-flung post-Tridentine architecture. The journey produced these photographs, but also the scent of the monastery and the convent, and churches with abundant, clerical kitchens where vintage recipes specified the number of Pater Nosters and Ave Marias to be recited for proper cooking times.