I'm John Bathshire, a great fun to speak with the classicist and author Catherine Coneybear of Brynmar College.

Her book is Augustine the African of the story of a man who spent his entire life except for several years visiting the Italian peninsula.

He dies and he's buried in where he dies, in Africa.

But here come the vandals.

And the vandals are sweeping over North Africa from the,

they crossed from the Iberian Peninsula and sweep towards Carthage.

They're going all the way across the map.

So his body is removed to Sardinia, I believe, of some time immediately after his death.

How many years afterwards was it moved, Catherine?

We don't know exactly when, but a few years after his death, when the vandals were in control of North Africa, the vandals being

Aryan, bishops who sympathized with Augustine's church stole away the body and took it to Calgary

in the southern tip of Sardinia, short sea crossing from Hippo.

That's why I think they chose the place, and Sardinia was not under Vandal rule.

Yes. And now if you're looking for his body in Sardinia, you're wrong,

because we join the professor.

She's in Milan, and she has the destination she wants to attend Pavia, which is south of

Milan.

Please take us on the trip, Catherine.

Yes.

It was a very hot day in July.

I knew that Augustine's body had been brought north to Pavia, though I'd never visited there before, and I couldn't really visualize the place, the church, anything.

It was all part of an early bid to unify Italy that the body was brought there by a Lombard

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