Italy 3: The Abbey

I step off the plane into Rome, and the first indication that I am really, truly in another country is the announcement happening over the PA system—not in English. I am only partially awake; I didn’t sleep much on the plane, and while it’s 9:30 in the morning here, my body tells me it’s 3:30 a.m.

I drag myself to attention as we collect our bags, as I change my dollars to euros, and by the time we reach the rental car counter, I’m coherent enough to test my Italian a little, trying to understand Michelle’s conversation with the man at the counter. They both use a mix of English and Italian, so I’m able to follow along as he asks if we’ve been here before (Michelle has), if we all speak Italian (I understood what he asked, which bodes well), and where we’re going on our trip. Michelle explains our route, and his face lights up.

“Italian tour,” he says in English, looking past Michelle at me and Petra, standing with the bags. “Molto buono! Italian tour!”

Michelle turns to grin at us as well. “I told you—this will be your tasting tour of Italy.”

Michelle gets the keys, and the man tells us the stall number our car is in. It’s brand new, compact, and a stick shift.

“Automatic cars are pretty much only for the old and disabled here,” Michelle explains. I haven’t driven stick since I was 18, but I suddenly want to practice again. Just in case I ever get to come back here and rent a car myself.

We manage to squeeze our luggage into the hatchback, and then attempt to escape the cramped, low-ceilinged garage. We pass Fiats, Puegots, Alpha Romeos, VWs. Everything is tiny compared the Ford F150s, Suburbans, and even the mini-vans I’m used to seeing.

We follow a trail of blue and white signs that teach me my first new word: Uscita. Exit. We emerge onto a busy street in what could be any modern city, to my eyes, but Michelle knows better.

“Look,” she says, pointing to the people on the sidewalk. “Puffy coats. Italians in their puffy coats—always, doesn’t matter what the temperature is.”

Sure enough, in spite of the weather being in the 70s this week, everyone is wearing winter coats. The coats we can see are almost all black, and sewn in two-inch horizontal stripes, making small puffy ridges.

“It’s a thing,” Michelle assures us. “You’re going to see them everywhere.”

We head onto the autostrada, the highway, with Petra navigating. Michelle has come prepared with a map and GPS, but she explains to us that in Italy, you really just need to follow the signs toward a major city in the general direction of where you want to go, and it will put you on the right road. We are headed first for Monte Cassino, south-east of Rome.

There are lots of trees here, even in the city. Some look like we’re used to, but others look like giant Bonsai trees, their trunks rising up and their branches spreading out at the top, or like something you might see in a documentary about Africa.

We pass under an overpass with “BLACK HAND” spray painted on it. We’re in a semi-industrial area, yet there are tiny personal vineyards dotting the area, behind little houses, down the edges of hills, right next to the main road. Everything is growing here, even though it’s only the first week of April—grass, trees, vines, weeds, everything.

We move south of Rome. The hills wrap and fold around each other, villages clustered on the peaks. Buildings huddle on the hilltops, old and new in a jumble of walls and roofs and clotheslines and crenellations. Sun breaks through the clouds, beaming in golden shafts on the mountainsides, lighting up cliffs, peaks, orange roofs and pink walls.

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

The tallest peaks stretch up into the clouds, which are puffy white and gray mountains in their own right. These are the southern Appenines, and they remind us of the Rocky Mountains. There are even windmills across the top of one, just like I saw the last time I drove through the Rockies.

We make it to Monte Cassino. We’ve seen two ambulances already, and I’m captured by their sound and my need to capture and remember it. I grab my notebook and write notes, counting the rhythm in my dance-teacher voice: “quick-quick-quick slow, quick-quick-quick slow.” The sound always comes up suddenly, the notes shifting drastically as it passes.

Every corner here boasts a pizzeria. We pass a pink-tiled automobile diagnosticó—walls, ceiling, floor, everything pink. The men inside have the same oil-stained hands as mechanics back home. Balconies are everywhere, all shapes and sizes, and all covered in potted gardens.

We start up the mountain toward Monte Cassino abbey. The abbey was bombed horribly during WWII when Allied soldiers thought German soldiers were hiding in it, but it turned out the soldiers were in the hills around it, and after it was bombed they hid more effectively in the rubble. The abbey was rebuilt after the war.

The switchbacks are steep, and there’s almost no shoulder on most of it. We pass men on bikes, pedaling their way up these brutal switchback.

I am less interested in the bombing of the abbey than in the building of it. This mountain is steep, rocky, and so, so high—I can’t comprehend deciding, without the use of modern machinery, to tackle such a project. Even getting to the abbey must have been prohibitively difficult, let alone getting building materials to the site. What if those men toiling up the hill on bikes had been, instead, carrying loads of goods up to the abbey? What if I had to drive an ox cart up this mountain—without the benefit of paved roads? This abbey, in fact, was built by St. Benedict on the site of an ancient temple of Jupiter, and after he destroyed the altar of Apollo which had been set there. People trekked to the top of this mountain to build here as early as the 7^th century B.C.

We reach the top and park in a lot just below the abbey. We are high enough for my breath to come harder as we walk up to the abbey. We’re early for our tour, but the lady at the information desk tells us we are welcome to walk around on our own until then.

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

The abbey is huge and open, with little green courtyards around a big one covered in flagstones. 

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

Two white doves walk on the grass near a small fountain in one of the hedged green courtyards, a symbol of perfect serenity. 

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

Arched balconies lead off the big flagstoned courtyard, looking out over the valley. I lean against the balcony rail, and wind tumbles my hair around my face.  

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

On the other side of a stone wall from the parking lot, a neat-rowed vineyard goes down off the side of the mountain, running out to a far older, crumbling wall that runs to a cliff edge. This place would have been largely self-sustaining once. How often would people have traveled up or down the mountain from the city at the base? What types of supplies would they have needed?

The dedication of men to long-term projects has always amazed me. In our world of instant gratification and quick results, how would you motivate someone to dedicate his life to a building that would not be completed in his lifetime? But go back only a few hundred years, and that was simply the way things were done.

I am fascinated by the doors here. Every door is different—huge arches of plain dark wood, rectangles split into rectangles split into rectangles, twisted curls of ironwork, plates of cast bronze, engravings in Latin, elaborate carvings of saints. I want to enter every doorway, but especially the one with the ironworked X’s across it that leads down into what looks like a much older section of the abbey. The crypt, perhaps?

This door leads into St. Benedict's cell. Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

We move around a group of young priests on a guided tour, go up the extra-wide steps between the statues of St. Benedict and his sister St. Scholastica to reach the upper courtyard before the chapel. Statues line the walls, some saints, but more kings and dukes, financial sponsors of the abbey’s past.

The chapel is huge. Marble is everywhere, cloudy gray, mottled green, pure white, burnt orange, goldenrod yellow, black with white swirls, some that looks like granite put under a magnifying glass so the differing color patches are the size of my hand. The marble is inlaid in circles, hearts, fleur de lis. Columns are made of two colors twisted like a unicorn’s horn. Every surface is embellished, through inlays or relief carvings. Candles nearly as tall as I am stretch toward the vaulted ceiling atop the altar at the front of the room.

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

Two priests and a nun go down an almost hidden set of stairs and through a little door under the altar stand. They begin to sing, their voices echoing through the near-empty sanctuary. It fits, here, in this place, like there ought always be singing, a capella and not always on key, but no one caring because it is not a performance.

My lack of sleep is catching up with me. I’m a little lightheaded, and I can hardly take in the beauty of this place, from the mountains surrounding us to the whorls of the ornately carved wooden choir seats at the front of the chapel. And when we take our official tour, that overwhelm becomes even more intense. We go down into the old section of the abbey, the part that survived the bombing. We descend between walls that have lasted centuries to visit the cell of St. Benedict. We climb the steps in the passage I’d peered down so longingly earlier, and the walls are set with artifacts recovered by archeologists after the bombing. Bits of carved inscriptions in Latin, jagged pieces of marble with medieval Italian words in red ink that still maintain their color, a statue of a lion, a perfectly carved human foot.

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

Hundreds of years of art, of religion, of dedication, of life, destroyed on the chance it might have been harboring enemy soldiers.

I care more about the bombing now.

At the end of our tour, the guide says the priests are preparing for vespers. We go to the chapel and sit, wanting to hear them sing. Gregorian chant in this place feels like it would be more beauty than my soul could handle.

Suddenly the dim chapel is flooded with a warm orange light, bright as though someone flicked a switch. The golden Easter candle shines before the brilliant gold-leafed altar.

It’s the sun—the setting sun has come through the clouds and is shining through the orange windows at the back of the chapel.

The bells begin to chime, and I hurry to open my phone’s recorder. I want to remember their deep voices, the rhythm of their call.

The priests don’t come, and thunder booms. We’ve been hearing it coming, could see the clouds across the valley earlier, but now it is here. We walk out through the carved wooden doors of the chapel and thunder breaks against the stones of the abbey, while fat drops splat against my head and bounce on the stones of the courtyard. 

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography

It smells of new life, fresh and wild and birthing possibilities. This mountain, the foundational stones of this abbey, have broken more thunderstorms than I can imagine, and still I feel as if, with this storm, everything is new. Or maybe I am new.

As we drive down the steep switchbacks away from the abbey, the rain pauses, and a double rainbow stretches between the mountains.

Pictures courtesy of Petra Laster Photography