Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine

Ever since I found out (via the Roadside America app) that the mummified remains of Mother Cabrini are on display in northern Manhattan, I've been planning to visit the shrine. I've never been a religious person, but I can totally get behind the Catholic tradition of piecing out the bodies of saints and putting the various parts on display.

When we were in Italy I became mildly obsessed with all the wax- and metal-dipped bodies we saw encased in glass and lit up like department store window displays.

The Cabrini shrine is located on Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights. It's very close to the 190th Street A stop—do make sure to take the elevator to exit the subway station (depositing you in Fort Tryon Park, near the Cloisters), otherwise you'll have to take a circuitous route that includes walking several blocks out of the way and an incredibly daunting set of stairs up the side of a hill that's steeper than anything you'll encounter elsewhere in Manhattan.

Mother Cabrini (née Francesca) was born in the Austrian Empire and in 1946 she became the first naturalized US citizen to be canonized by the Roman Catholic church. The shrine was built in 1957 and most of her body is in that glass case—her head is in Rome and an arm is at the National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier in Chicago.

The chapel is a really beautiful space, with most of the wall covered in a recently-restored mosaic depicting Mother Cabrini's life. She is the patron saint of immigrants, which is represented by the Statue of Liberty, boats bound for America and one strapping young, pick-axe-wielding man, aka "The Glory of America."

Another facet of Catholicism that I can get behind is the inevitable gift shop—you enter the shrine through one, of course, where you can buy all manner of saintly ephemera. There are cards, statues, medallions and book marks and for a moment I felt like I was back in Vatican City. When I was told that the postcard I was buying would be "27 cents," it was even harder for me to believe that we were still in Manhattan.