Know the valley Casentino, Arezzo, Italy
The two sanctuaries: La Verna and Camaldoli
The valley’s two mountains each keep a monastery. Both are still working, and both let you in.
Two religious communities have shaped this valley for eight and nine centuries, and both are still here: still praying, still open to anyone who climbs up to them. They are half the reason the forest is still standing. You do not need to be a believer to feel the weight of either place, but you arrive as a guest in a house of prayer, and it repays you to arrive like one.
La Verna, on its cliff
High on the eastern crest of the valley, above the village of Chiusi della Verna, a bare grey cliff pushes out of the beech forest. In 1213 the local count, Orlando Cattani, gave the rock to Francis of Assisi, and in September 1224 Francis is said to have received the stigmata here, the wounds of the crucifixion, on a ledge of that same stone. It is the most important Franciscan place in the world after Assisi itself.
The sanctuary that grew around the rock is not a museum: Franciscan friars still live and pray here. Walk the corridor to the Cappella delle Stimmate, built over the spot; look down through the Sasso Spicco, the great split boulder where Francis went to be alone; and do not leave without the Chiesa Maggiore, whose walls carry some of the finest glazed terracotta Andrea della Robbia ever made, blue and white and impossibly calm. Most afternoons the friars walk the corridor in procession, chanting, and visitors are welcome to follow in silence.
La Verna is high, around 1100 metres, and it makes its own weather. Low cloud on the mountain is not a loss: the mist is half the point. Bring a coat even in August.
Camaldoli, in the forest
On the opposite, northern shoulder of the valley, deep inside the national park above Poppi, Camaldoli is older and quieter. Around 1012 a reforming monk named Romuald founded a hermitage in this clearing of silver fir, and the Camaldolese Benedictines he began are still here a thousand years later. There are two parts, a couple of kilometres and a few hundred metres of altitude apart. Lower down is the monastery, with its church and the Antica Farmacia, the monks’ sixteenth-century pharmacy, its walnut cabinets still full of the balms and liqueurs they draw from the forest. Higher up, among the trees, is the Sacro Eremo: a walled cluster of white hermit cells, each its own tiny house and garden, where monks still keep the solitary life. You can visit the hermitage church but not the cells, and around them the rule is simple: silence.
What the monks really left is the forest itself. They have tended these woods since the eleventh century, cutting and replanting the firs under a code so careful that the oldest strict reserve in Italy, Sasso Fratino, grew up under their care. Camaldoli is the greener, gentler of the two mountains: no cliff, no drama, just very old trees and the smell of resin.
How to visit, and how to behave
- Getting up there Both sit at the end of mountain roads, and a car is by far the easiest way; the last climb to each is steep and narrow but paved. Allow a good half hour up from the valley floor.
- Dress for a church, and a mountain Shoulders and knees covered inside the sanctuaries, and a layer more than you think you need: both are above 1000 metres and stay cool even in high summer.
- Keep your voice down These are working communities of prayer, not sights. Phones silent, especially in the chapels and anywhere near the Eremo at Camaldoli.
- Time it around the offices Following the friars’ procession at La Verna, or slipping into vespers sung in the forest at Camaldoli, is the real thing here, better than any photograph. Times are posted at each sanctuary.
- Stay for lunch, or the night Both keep a simple guest table and rooms for those who want to go slower, and a shop where the monks sell what they make: honey, liqueurs, soaps, herbal remedies.
- One a day La Verna and Camaldoli sit on opposite shoulders of the valley, an hour of driving apart. You can do both in a day, but each deserves an unhurried couple of hours, so a sanctuary a day is the kinder plan.
What is on at the sanctuaries
The valley’s calendar is full of feast days, patronal processions and retreats, and many of them still climb to these two mountains. Here is what is coming up.
- Listening and silence in the friars’ garden, La Verna
- Feast of St James, Moggiona
- Feast of Our Lady of the Snows
- Patronal Feast of the Assumption at Stia
- Religious procession
- Feast of the Assumption
The friars have walked the daily procession to the Chapel of the Stigmata at La Verna, weather permitting, for centuries.
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