When Salvatore Verdirome was visited by the Virgin Mary, his experience with the apparition did not go smoothly.
“It appeared to me and said something,” he told the New York Times in December of 2000. “I couldn’t quite catch it.” So, unsure of his intended message, he did what any true visionary would do. “I just started building.”
Verdirome began building an elaborate shrine to the Mother of Jesus and spread it out over his entire small plot of property in Norwich, Connecticut. He took forty-seven bathtubs, up-ended them, and painted them sky blue. He placed a statue of the Virgin Mary inside each one, and spread piles of green glass in between them. He constructed three large wooden crosses, a fence, and a stone wall with the Ten Commandments chiseled into it to go along with the bathing Blessed Mothers. His goal in constructing all this was to enlighten others about their own faith.
“Some people really don’t know what religion is,” he said.
Soon people began visiting his strange roadside shrine, and dubbed it “The Sanctuary of Love.” Busloads of people visited the odd site each day, beckoned by the wooden sign Verdirome has posted on the road in front of his house. “Welcome to the Sanctuary of Love,” it read. “Your Faith Brought You Here.”
Unfortunately, Verdirome would have needed a whole lot of faith or some sort of miracle to keep the Sanctuary thriving. He owed over $60,000 in overdue property taxes and $40,000 in overdue electric bills. The city took his land away from him and put him in an old folks home. While various groups attempted to raise funds for him, none come through with the cash.
The eighty-four year old continued to build on his land despite all this, with a down to earth belief that the government will not take his land.
“If they take it over, what are they going to do with it?” he asks.
–Special Thanks to Shawn Douglas for alerting us to this site.
Salvatore Verdirome, 84, Builder of Backyard Connecticut Shrine, Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 29, 2004
Salvatore Verdirome, a carpenter whose singular religious vision transformed his backyard into a terraced shrine of bathtub Madonnas and became a place of solace for people who lost money at the Foxwoods Resort Casino, died in Norwich, Conn., on May 15. He was 84. The cause was a stroke, The Norwich Bulletin reported. He had lived at a nursing home since he was forced by illness and pressure from tax collectors to leave his home in Norwich.
He was working as a carpenter at the Electric Boat submarine yard in 1971 when he said he was struck by a religious vision: the steep-hilled yard behind his three-family house should be terraced with statues of Jesus, the saints and the Virgin Mary. The place became the Sanctuary of Love.
Mr. Verdirome hauled old cast-iron bathtubs up the hill in a wheelbarrow, upended them into the dirt and nestled religious statues inside. Each tub was painted blue on the inside, to better show off the statues.
Mr. Verdirome, with his long gray hair and beard, became a distinctive figure around eastern Connecticut as he scrounged junk shops for old tubs. Some people would drop old bathtubs off in front of his house; only the old-fashioned kind, with an oval shape and claw feet, would do.
All together, he assembled about 50 bathtub statue shelters, and then worked on other parts of his vision: the Ten Commandments, the Stations of the Cross, and the Sea of Glass from the Book of Revelations. The sea was made of chunks of aqua glass Mr. Verdirome got from a Thermos factory.
Visitors could travel through the shrine on marble and concrete walkways, decorated with mosaics and religious sayings. The shrine became increasingly popular after the Foxwoods casino opened nearby in Mashantucket, Conn. Gamblers would stop to pray at a favored statue. Mr. Verdirome never charged admission, but some people left coins and other donations in a bucket by the entrance.
Money troubles ended up being the sanctuary's undoing. City leaders in Norwich foreclosed on the home after it accumulated $100,000 in unpaid taxes and utility bills. Foreclosure proceedings started in 2000, and a social worker found Mr. Verdirome a place in a nursing home. In 2002, Norwich auctioned off the statues and any other items of value on the property.
|
|
