Monte Oliveto

“They certainly knew how to pick their sites,” my husband and I thought as we drove through the rolling Tuscan countryside—“they” being the monks of the Olivetan Congregation of the Benedictines whose abbey we were going to see. Monte Oliveto Maggiore lies some 22 miles south of Siena, a great red brick complex of buildings shaded by hundreds and hundreds of old cypress trees. The site is spectacular: it is on the spur of a hill jutting into the plain, surrounded on three sides by deep ravines and towering cliffs. It looked like a green island in a dun-colored landscape, ideally suited to prayer and contemplation. The Blessed Bernard Tolomei, who founded the monastery in 1319, had, like so many other founders of monasteries in Italy, a sure eye for beauty (the Benedictines especially excelled at this).

You enter the abbey over a drawbridge hung from a battlemented medieval tower; to get to the buildings and church, you go down a steep, brick-paved, cypress-lined alley, to the end of the spur. We met a wedding party on their way from the church to the restaurant that is thoughtfully attached to the abbey (there are no nearby villages or inns). It is now fashionable in Italy to choose a picturesque church for one’s wedding and, I must say, I wouldn’t have minded the Monte Oliveto abbey for mine either—but too late, too late.

“They certainly knew how to pick their sites,” my husband and I thought as we drove through the rolling Tuscan countryside—“they” being the monks of the Olivetan Congregation of the Benedictines whose abbey we were going to see. Monte Oliveto Maggiore lies some 22 miles south of Siena, a great red brick complex of buildings shaded by hundreds and hundreds of old cypress trees. The site is spectacular: it is on the spur of a hill jutting into the plain, surrounded on three sides by deep ravines and towering cliffs. It looked like a green island in a dun-colored landscape, ideally suited to prayer and contemplation. The Blessed Bernard Tolomei, who founded the monastery in 1319, had, like so many other founders of monasteries in Italy, a sure eye for beauty (the Benedictines especially excelled at this).

You enter the abbey over a drawbridge hung from a battlemented medieval tower; to get to the buildings and church, you go down a steep, brick-paved, cypress-lined alley, to the end of the spur. We met a wedding party on their way from the church to the restaurant that is thoughtfully attached to the abbey (there are no nearby villages or inns). It is now fashionable in Italy to choose a picturesque church for one’s wedding and, I must say, I wouldn’t have minded the Monte Oliveto abbey for mine either—but too late, too late.