Rome's Hot Priest Calendar Has Been a Best-Selling Souvenir for 30 Years. Almost Nobody in It Is Actually a Priest.Giovanni Galizia Has Been the Face of Rome's Best-Selling Souvenir for 23 Years. He Is a Flight Attendant From Palermo.Walk into almost any souvenir shop within a kilometre of the Vatican and you will find it: the Calendario Romano, twelve months of clean-jawed young men in cassocks and clerical collars, selling for between €6 and €25 and shifting by the thousands every year to tourists who assume they are looking at actual Roman Catholic priests. They are not. And the man on the cover has been quietly correcting the record for two decades. Giovanni Galizia, 39, originally from Palermo, has appeared on the cover of the Calendario Romano since 2004. He has never been a priest. "I would remember if I had been," he told Repubblica with characteristic dry humour. In real life he works as a flight attendant.  The story begins, as these things often do, with a friend of a friend. In 2004 a photographer named Piero Pazzi was documenting Italian cities through their symbolic figures: gondoliers for Venice, priests for Rome. He met Galizia, then 17, in Palermo and asked if he would pose. Galizia said yes. He signed a release. He received no payment. He thought nothing more of it.  Twenty-three years later, his face is still there. The Legend That Grew Around Him Over the years, the photograph has generated its own mythology on social media. One post claimed the young priest in the image was now 84 and serving as a parish priest in Milan. Another insisted he had left the Church in protest at its teachings. A third described him as a rebel who had abandoned his vows. None of it had any basis in reality, and Galizia, not particularly active on social media, was often the last to know what was being said about him.  The one time the photograph genuinely caused him problems was when a website used his image alongside the story of a priest who had confessed to blasphemy, drug use and dealing. "My colleagues at work asked me: what are they talking about?" he recalled. He threatened legal action and the page was removed.  "I don't see anything sexy in that photo," he told Repubblica. "I see a close-up, there is nothing sensual about it. No suggestion of anything. It is just a nice photo, a clean face."  The Calendar Itself The Calendario Romano was the invention of Piero Pazzi, a Venetian archivist and amateur photographer who came up with the idea in the early 1990s as a way of giving tourists practical information about Rome alongside atmospheric images of its most recognisable symbolic figures. "I did it to give tourists information about the city and the Vatican," Pazzi has said. The calendar originally included details about Rome's history, pharmacy locations, and other practical information alongside the photographs. Pazzi has since admitted that the majority of his subjects were not priests at all. Some were models. Some were men he approached on the street or photographed at religious ceremonies in Spain, where he found willing subjects during processions. One of the calendar's most enduring faces, the man on the March page of the 2004 edition, was a Spanish estate agent from Seville named David Ruiz Suárez, who had no idea he had been photographed until a friend recognised him in a calendar bought during a trip to Rome. "It is true, they are not all priests," Pazzi has acknowledged. "But the intention was to give prominence to priests as a symbol of Rome, a city that owes so much to the Vatican and the Church." Il  Still Selling, Still Surprising The calendar has been on sale for more than thirty years and shows no sign of fatigue. Tourists buy it in their thousands annually, drawn by the same combination of religious iconography and physical attractiveness that Pazzi intuited in the 1990s. The joke, or the charm, or the mild transgression of it, depending on your point of view, has proved remarkably durable. Galizia, for his part, has made his peace with the situation. He signed the release, the terms were clear, and the visibility has always been, as he puts it, discreet. People who recognise him ask if it is really him. He says yes. They smile. He smiles. What he has never done, in twenty-three years, is pretend to be a priest.  

Giovanni Galizia Has Been the Face of Rome's Best-Selling Souvenir for 23 Years. He Is a Flight Attendant From Palermo. Walk into almost any souvenir shop within a kilometre of the Vatican and you will find it: the Calendario Romano, twelve months of clean-jawed young men in cassocks and clerical collars, selling for between €6 and €25 and shifting by the thousands every year to tourists who assume they are looking at actual Roman Catholic priests. They are not. And the man on the cover has been quietly correcting the record for two decades. Giovanni Galizia, 39, originally from Palermo, has appeared on the cover of the Calendario Romano since 2004. He has never been a priest. "I would remember if I had been," he told Repubblica with characteristic dry humour. In real life he works as a flight attendant.  The story begins, as these things often do, with a friend of a friend. In 2004 a photographer named Piero Pazzi was documenting Italian cities through their symbolic figures: gondoliers for Venice, priests for Rome. He met Galizia, then 17, in Palermo and asked if he would pose. Galizia said yes. He signed a release. He received no payment. He thought nothing more of it.  Twenty-three years later, his face is still there. Over the years, the photograph has generated its own mythology on social media. One post claimed the young priest in the image was now 84 and serving as a parish priest in Milan. Another insisted he had left the Church in protest at its teachings. A third described him as a rebel who had abandoned his vows. None of it had any basis in reality, and Galizia, not particularly active on social media, was often the last to know what was being said about him.  The one time the photograph genuinely caused him problems was when a website used his image alongside the story of a priest who had confessed to blasphemy, drug use and dealing. "My colleagues at work asked me: what are they talking about?" he recalled. He threatened legal action and the page was removed.  "I don't see anything sexy in that photo," he told Repubblica. "I see a close-up, there is nothing sensual about it. No suggestion of anything. It is just a nice photo, a clean face."  The Calendario Romano was the invention of Piero Pazzi, a Venetian archivist and amateur photographer who came up with the idea in the early 1990s as a way of giving tourists practical information about Rome alongside atmospheric images of its most recognisable symbolic figures. "I did it to give tourists information about the city and the Vatican," Pazzi has said. The calendar originally included details about Rome's history, pharmacy locations, and other practical information alongside the photographs. Pazzi has since admitted that the majority of his subjects were not priests at all. Some were models. Some were men he approached on the street or photographed at religious ceremonies in Spain, where he found willing subjects during processions. One of the calendar's most enduring faces, the man on the March page of the 2004 edition, was a Spanish estate agent from Seville named David Ruiz Suárez, who had no idea he had been photographed until a friend recognised him in a calendar bought during a trip to Rome. "It is true, they are not all priests," Pazzi has acknowledged. "But the intention was to give prominence to priests as a symbol of Rome, a city that owes so much to the Vatican and the Church." The calendar has been on sale for more than thirty years and shows no sign of fatigue. Tourists buy it in their thousands annually, drawn by the same combination of religious iconography and physical attractiveness that Pazzi intuited in the 1990s. The joke, or the charm, or the mild transgression of it, depending on your point of view, has proved remarkably durable. Galizia, for his part, has made his peace with the situation. He signed the release, the terms were clear, and the visibility has always been, as he puts it, discreet. People who recognise him ask if it is really him. He says yes. They smile. He smiles. What he has never done, in twenty-three years, is pretend to be a priest.