Just when we thought the hype was over, this weekend we got the news that the Procuratore della Repubblica (call him the District Attorney) of the port city Civitavecchio in Lazio is about bring an “obscenity” suit against film director Ron Howard and a dozen other people involved in the production and distribution of the 2005 movie The Da Vinci Code, over a year after its Italian release. The Code is long gone from the first-run screens here, but, after the absurdly high-profile London trial for plagiary, and with production about to start on the movie of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (for which Tom Hanks has signed a contract that will apparently dwarf all previous records), you begin to wonder if the courts are simply ingenuous or part of the publicity team. A lawsuit never hurt sales. The plaintiffs are local celibate clergymen offended by the notion that Christ could have fathered a child or Mary Magdalene have been invited to the all-male Last Supper. They want to know why the movie wasn’t forbidden to minors? Apparently, they had no problem with minors getting their fill of the sadistic Aramaic gore of Mel Gibson’s Passion.

I don’t regret never reading or seeing The Da Vinci Code (or Mel Gibson’s Passion). I imagine that it is typical far-fetched scandal-seeking sensationalist fiction, with no claim whatsoever to being historical, inspired among other things by the success of Umberto Eco’s comparatively sober-sided 14th-century mystery The Name of the Rose, which is set in a Benedictine monastery. (The movie, starring Sean Connery, turned out to be something of a flop.) Eco, an Italian Catholic and a true medievalist by formation, treated the monks in his novel like a group of normal people (there are always a few in any group who aren’t normal). He certainly treated them better than Boccaccio in his Decameron, who actually wrote in the Middle Ages, when there were far more of them around. And what Boccaccio didn’t do to them, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his film based on the Decameron, did.