The friends of God hail visitors to Little Italy from an Exeter Street rock garden, a baker's dozen of Catholic saints in a sidewalk shrine built to bolster people's faith at the end of a troubled century.
"The energy of the saints comes to people in many different forms," says Larry Fenaroli, a chef who made the garden in front of his house. "If people believe that this energy is still with us, it might give them hope as they pass by. We have no one to look up to today. Everything seems so self-serving."
Although not a practicing Catholic, Mr. Fenaroli is a spiritual man with a strong nostalgia for the traditions that shaped his childhood. Growing up at 209 N. Front St. in the St. Vincent de Paul parish in the 1950s, he helped the Rev. John Sinnott Martin build a churchyard rock garden.
"Working with stone and plants makes me happy," he says. "This is a talent I haven't been able to express well in the city."
When Mr. Fenaroli started his project in May, making a wall of flat rocks from a creek that runs through his friend Ty Hodanish's farm in New Jersey, he merely intended something to complement the Formstone on his rowhouse.
But then his next-door neighbor thought it would be nice to have the Blessed Mother in with the flowers and gave him a white ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary. By the time the garden was finished in late June with shamrocks, lilies and passion fruit, everybody had gotten into the act.
"Someone said, 'Oh, you need this' and 'You need that,' " said Mary Sergi, who donated the statue of Mary, which is turned toward her house. "The next thing you know -- there it is!"
Mr. Fenaroli focused on saints especially beloved by the Italian people, and from their homes came an altar's worth of foot-high statues.
Frances Caliri on Trinity Street donated St. Gabriel, St. Francis and Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
"I say prayers to all of them," said Mrs. Caliri, 74, who keeps a small altar at the top of her stairs.
Angie Guerriero, whose house faces the shrine, contributed a statue of St. Jude. Sts. Rita, Lucy and Rocco came from a gift shop at the Basilica of the Assumption on Cathedral Street. St. Gennaro landed in Baltimore's Little Italy from New York's Little Italy. St. Joseph and St. Teresa were bought at Joseph's Gift and Religious Goods on Harford Road. St. Anthony came from the Rev. James Purvey, a friend of Mr. Fenaroli's assigned to St. Michael's Church in Overlea.
