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Slow Tuscany
> Tuscany
> Arezzo
> Piero della Francesca
San Francesco at the sacred Mount in La Verna
Damiano
Andreini
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We
have been following the traces of the ancient and modern Etruscans,
we have been imaging over popular tales from the Maremma countryside
and discovering Breton swords embedded in the golden stones
of the Sienese hills. We have also stopped on the scaffoldings
of certain Florentine churches, next to acrobat-painters, to
observe and nearly smell the scent of fresh colors just laid
down on the wall. We have been hoping for the destiny of poor
witches and long-nosed puppets, we have been sailing for "not-yet-found"
islands and we have eventually dived into the thermal waters
of clear stone baths.
This is also another face of the farm-holiday: the pleasure
of stopping and leaving again, but with no hurry, towards a
multi-faced reality. It must be said, on the other hand, that
I would give and explain a main reason for a stay in a farm-holiday,
if I were to give one: the silence. Yes, indeed, more than once
the silence had been indicated to me as the real something new
of the farm-holidays. I kept this information as something given
for granted, since people usually come from the noising environments
of the cities and they are immediately able to realize the difference,
while in their bedrooms, out of which only crickets are passing
by and where the only lightning consists of the moonlight or
of the soft light of the fireflies (who are absolutely silent,
differently from the crickets).
That is why, at the beginning, this reason seemed to me an obvious
one, as such, but it then came to my mind that a contemporary
poet had defined the city noise as "the most terrible silence",
in that it caused solitude. So I could understand that the quietness
of our countries are worthy of an opportunity to the tourists:
that is why I'm now going to accompany you (obviously, keeping
the voice low) towards the secret of La Verna ...
La Verna: «The most sacred between the Mountains...»
In 1224, Francesco (Francis) of Bernardone, who was then 43,
went again to La Verna. It was not the first time that he walked
up the mount together with some other friends, as he had been
regularly visiting the slopes of the Mount Penna
for about ten years. Who knows what did he think the first time,
in the spring of 1214, about that Apennine mountain at the border
between Tuscany and Umbria! Yet, we know that the birds of the
wood gaily gathered over the large oak, as soon as he reached
half the side of the mountain, to greet his arrival. It was
perhaps because of this event that he immediately liked the
"big stone" of the Casentino area, stretched out here and there
over the open greens or inside the large woods of beeches, fir-trees
and ash-trees.
It was in the middle of the summer of 1224 that Francesco -
obviously St.
Francis of Assisi, who is currently the patron saint
of Italy - went there again, the harmonious silence of those
woods had probably become familiar and precious to him, but
it was also the last time that he saw those places, because
the malaria and his almost total blindness would not allow him
a new journey from his dear Assisi to La Verna any longer. He
himself could realize that: I in fact believe that his latest
suffered stay at the mount of La Verna was intended by him as
the opportunity to give his life a full stop and take out the
conclusions of a "story" written along the course of years of
suffering and hardships.
Likewise many other young people of his time, who had been imbued
with chivalrous culture (Francesco's mother initiated him to
the Provencal
music and poetry), Francesco dreamt of the glory
of the army and of the honor. When captured in a battle, he
also thought of leaving for a crusade to the Holy Land; but
further to a fever attack and to a dream he had, he decided
to go back home. He would rather start another kind of crusade,
when a few months later he went to Rome to visit the tomb of
the apostles: he was practically shocked at seeing the strong
contrast existing between the luxury inside the church and the
poor state of abjection into which the beggars were left abandoned.
On the way back home, he went down from his horse to clasp and
kiss a leper, just what "he would be more reluctant to do".
His father, Bernardone, was a well-off fabric merchant, who
made his fortune in Provence. His success made Bernardone decide
to change his child's name from Giovanni into "Francesco " (Francis).
Perhaps he never expected his first-born son would get to proclaim
himself, at the age of 25 (in 1206), naked and with the clothes
in his hands, the bride-groom of lady Poverty.
Was he to be thought mad? He would not be alone, then, if this
was the case, since his ideal to live in absolute freedom and
in total communion with the world creatures was soon shared
and embraced by thousands of his contemporary people. After
18 years, from that day of January 1206 until August 1224, the
"poor man" from Assisi could go to La Verna for his last time.
Until that date, he had dedicated his life to the pray and the
preaching, while assisting suffering people in the leper house
and sleeping in the night only in poor dwellings; he had been
begging stones in Assisi, with which he restored some churches
in the Umbrian town; he traveled to France, Spain and even to
Egypt, where the crusaders were besieging Damietta,
an Arab city then considered inexpugnable, but where Francesco
was able, instead, with totally different purposes, to be welcomed
by the wise sultan Melek al-Kamil and from where, after two
weeks time, he came back full of gifts given to him by the same
sultan.
In those years still more friars followed the kind of life of
Francesco, who had any how to complain about some choices taken
inside the ordination he himself had founded; the teaching in
the schools of theology, the property of buildings and the more
and more derogation to the "new living" manners were betraying
the foundations of the wedding with lady Poverty. Francesco's
Frates ("Friars") were dangerously getting close to the more
typical world, thereby going farther from him. He therefore
announced his words: "From this moment I wish to be considered
not but dead".
To such consideration Francesco himself attained from then onwards
and this was the feeling that accompanied himself through his
walks in the woods of beeches and chestnut trees, through the
clearings he met, populated by wild boars and flied over by
buzzards and hawks, up to the complete silence in La Verna,
in August 1224. He realized he was not wrong - and this helped
him to quiet his displeasure for the failure of his undertaking
and for his total feeling of uncertainty and worry - when «he
eventually saw in his hands and in his feet appear the same
marks of suffering he had just seen, while meditating over his
own old and recent actions, to that mysterious crucified man
appeared to him, like a seraph, nailed on the cross, two wings
coming out over the head, two wings wide open to fly and two
wings covering the whole body».
Two years later that little dark-haired-complexion man, who
called "brothers" the fire and the wind and "sisters" the soil
and the water and who would keep hidden as long as possible
the stigmas he had, would meet "Sister Death" in Assisi and
would be laid down "naked on the naked soil", as per his will.
La
Verna has then become famous all over the world as
the place where Francesco got the stigmas and it has been continuously
visited in the course of the centuries.
Its visitors, once the Tiber and Arno valley are left past behind,
are welcomed by the Monastery, by the Sasso Spicco, by the Stigmas
Passageway and other Franciscan places, further to admiring
one of the most beautiful whole of della Robbia works (terra-cottas)
from 15th and 16th century. In spite of so many visitors, the
Sacred Mount in La Verna still maintains and projects today
its strong silent atmosphere. You will be able to verify it:
on the slopes of a mount, half suspended between the earth and
the sky, La Verna still remains the scene of a substantially
secret event.
Damiano Andreini |
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