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Flannery had been clear about not wishing to take the baths, an immersion in the springwater believed to possess healing properties. She insisted that she was going as “a pilgrim, not a patient.” She assured Betty Hester, before departing, “I am one of those people who could die for his religion sooner than take a bath for it.” Her resolve was strengthened by Gabrielle Rolin, who had remarked in Paris that the only true miracle at Lourdes was the absence of any epidemics from the filthy water. Yet Sally felt sure that Mrs. Semmes would be disappointed if Flannery returned home without taking part in the essential ritual. Using her French, and his German, she and Bill managed to secure for their friend an appointment for early the next morning. Flannery complained that Sally had a “hyper-thyroid moral imagination” — “she was determined that I take it and gave me no peace” — but grudgingly acceded to her arrangements.

Before nine o’clock, she arrived at les piscines, actually a series of seventeen sunken marble pools — six for men, eleven for women — allowing some privacy, with only about forty people ahead of her in the stone waiting portico, so the waters appeared clean. She drank from a communal thermos bottle circulated among the malades. And she put on the sack robe she was handed, still damp from the previous woman, before passing behind a curtain and being lowered into the water. “At least there are no societal trappings along with the medieval hygiene,” she wrote Elizabeth Bishop. “I saw nothing but peasants and was very conscious of the distinct odor of the crowd. The supernatural is a fact there but it displaces nothing natural; except maybe those germs.” Nor did she report a mystical experience. “Nobody I am sure prays in that water,” she told Betty.

In the evening, the group flew to Barcelona, where they stayed overnight at the Hotel Colón. In the morning, at the Cathedral, Flannery purchased a tile for Betty. Hearing so much about her from Flannery and Bill, Sally purchased for Betty, too, a small plastic statue of the Spanish Black Virgin of Montserrat, to be toted back to Georgia. Two of the Savannah travelers, the spinster sisters Eleanor and Marie Bennett, of Augusta, recorded the events of the remainder of May 3 in their highly detailed pilgrimage diary: “After lunch we left Barcelona by plane for Rome. On our way, we dipped down in Nice for thirty minutes; also, at Milan for customs, on entering Italy. This was our longest plane ride on the Continent, something over five hours. Flying over the Alps, it was a beautiful sight to see the mountain peaks through the clouds.”

The high point of Flannery’s journey turned out to be Rome, having already been intrigued by a promise from Caroline Gordon that the eternal city would improve her prose. Skipping the general tourism, Flannery stayed shuttered in her room at the Regina — a hotel coincidentally sharing her mother’s name — until the next day, when she crossed the Tiber River with the group to attend a general audience with Pope Pius XII at St. Peter’s Basilica. In the company of Archbishop O’Hara of Savannah, all were ushered by a knight-chamberlain to front box seats. At noon, to roars of “Viva Papa!” the pope, in his first Sunday audience after a long illness, was borne to his throne on his sedia gestatoria. Following the audience, he walked down to greet the travelers, giving a special blessing to Flannery, on account of her crutches. Impressed, she hurriedly wrote Betty, from Rome: “There is a wonderful radiance and liveliness about the old man. He fairly springs up and down the little steps to his chair. Whatever the special superaliveness that holiness is, it is very apparent in him.”

Staying long enough for a Monday evening dinner in honor of Archbishop O’Hara, given by the group at the Regina Hotel, Sally needed to bid farewell once again to her friend, a familiar event in their history, to return to Levanto. So for the rest of the trip Flannery trained her sights on her fellow pilgrims. She and her mother were now both