La Verna

La Verna is a very holy place: St. Francis received his stigmata there on September 14, 1224. The sanctuary lies three thousand feet high in the Casentino, a Tuscan region of heavily forested mountains east of Florence; you’d think you were in northern Europe, so close together are the pines and beeches. The mountain top is rocky, with deep fissures and solitary caves that served as cells; St. Francis’ is a rough hole amidst enormous cliffs. It is dark and dank, and the Saint slept on a bed of stone. I have never seen a place that recreated as vividly the monastic life of the Middle Ages. One shivers.

In 1213, Count Orlando dei Cattani gave the mountain as a present to St. Francis, who was looking for a hermitage. The Saint, accompanied by fifty armed men to protect him from the wild beasts of the forest, moved there two years later with a few of his brethren to live in the caves and in huts they constructed from clay and tree branches. Here he remained to receive the stigmata, and here he returned six more times to meditate. Thus La Verna became one of the main centers of the Franciscans. Over the centuries, a number of monastic buildings rose among the rocks and trees, and over the centuries hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have visited this sacred site. We were among the pilgrims on a beautiful September afternoon, driving through the dappled sunlight of the trees, past alpine meadows covered with flowers, looking, from this great height, at the Tuscan countryside.

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Nika Hazelton

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La Verna is a very holy place: St. Francis received his stigmata there on September 14, 1224. The sanctuary lies three thousand feet high in the Casentino, a Tuscan region of heavily forested mountains east of Florence; you’d think you were in northern Europe, so close together are the pines and beeches. The mountain top is rocky, with deep fissures and solitary caves that served as cells; St. Francis’ is a rough hole amidst enormous cliffs. It is dark and dank, and the Saint slept on a bed of stone. I have never seen a place that recreated as vividly the monastic life of the Middle Ages. One shivers.

In 1213, Count Orlando dei Cattani gave the mountain as a present to St. Francis, who was looking for a hermitage. The Saint, accompanied by fifty armed men to protect him from the wild beasts of the forest, moved there two years later with a few of his brethren to live in the caves and in huts they constructed from clay and tree branches. Here he remained to receive the stigmata, and here he returned six more times to meditate. Thus La Verna became one of the main centers of the Franciscans. Over the centuries, a number of monastic buildings rose among the rocks and trees, and over the centuries hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have visited this sacred site. We were among the pilgrims on a beautiful September afternoon, driving through the dappled sunlight of the trees, past alpine meadows covered with flowers, looking, from this great height, at the Tuscan countryside.