Last Posts from Italy

Salute!

Here is another set of postings!

Pace e bene,

Tom and Susan.

We meet Roberto Venanzoni in the Department of Natural Sciences at the University of Perugia, where Benedictine monks still share the campus with the faculty and students. 

Roberto has arranged for us to meet Professore Alessandro Menghini, who conceived the university’s Medieval Garden.

 Menghini is a bright-eyed, two-legged encyclopedia of all things medieval: numerology and alchemy, medicinal and culinary herbs, Scripture and the Book of Nature, which many people in the Middle Ages believed was as much the word of God as the Bible.

 Professor Menghini spends an hour walking us around the garden, explaining its symbolism. It is a microcosm of the moral and physical universe arranged according to numbers once considered sacred. Planted in triangles, circles, and rectangles of soil are hundreds of plants used as medicines, foods, seasonings, scents, and symbols during the time of Saint Francis.

 It’s impossible to take it all in at once, but Menghini’s enthusiasm is contagious. Suddenly every plant, every color, every fragrance and taste has its own character and significance.

Oasis of Alviano

The Oasis of Alviano is a wetland managed by the World Wildlife Fund. We had tried to visit the oasis early in our travels, but it is only open on Sundays and holidays. 

Later, we pass it again on our way to Rome, but it is a Tuesday. We decide to walk around its wooded perimeter anyway, and peer through the trees. We hope to catch at least a glimpse of it.

 At the entrance, we bump into a WWF naturalist. She is preparing to take a group of schoolchildren on a field trip through the oasis in hour or so. 

Tom asks her about the net she is carrying to scoop up wetland creatures to show the children. 

She looks us up and down — sunhats, notebook, camera, boots — and reaches in her pocket.

 “Take my keys and let yourselves through,” she says. “You can leave them for me at the bar down the road.”

 The oasis is one of the high points of our travels, a place where we experience the bottomlands of central Italy as they were when Saint Francis crossed them on foot, in all their soggy glory. 

Poppies

As we travel along a country road below Monte Cucco National Park, we see a farmer on a tractor busily plowing his field. 

His neighbor’s field is fallow, full of blossoming flowers — poppies, cornflowers, and mustard.

Vallerimita

On the other, eastern side of the Apennines in the region called Le Marche, the soils and plant communities are different from what we've become used to in Umbria. We visit the hermitage of Santa Maria di Valdisasso, which is surrounded by maples and other deciduous trees and is specially protected by the regional government because of its rare plants.

When Francis first came here in 1210, he had trouble finding this little Benedictine hermitage. He asked for help from a farmer, who left his plow to guide him up the mountain. They say that when the farmer returned to his field, it was perfectly plowed and yet his oxen were rested. At the bottom of the mountain we see a likely field, and our hunch is confirmed by a stone plaque commemorating the “miracle.”

 Francis liked Valdisasso so much that he often visited there and it was an important retreat for Franciscans for centuries before reverting to the Benedictines. In the little garden, we meet a sweet young Benedictine nun who is reading a book about Saint Clare.

Rieti Valley

We come to the Rieti Valley to visit four places that Saint Francis knew and loved, including La Foresta (pictured).

We stay in a little family hotel in a grove of walnut trees near the sorgente di Santa Susanna, the prolific source of a river that flows across the Rieti Valley. Eight centuries ago, the flat floor of this karstic valley was a marshy lake. A fisherman who ferried Francis across it gave him a fish, but rather than keep it to eat the saint put it back in the water. The happy fish played around the boat, apparently unwilling to leave until Saint Francis blessed him.

 There are still wetlands in the Rieti Valley as well as two lakes. We visit the four convents founded by Saint Francis in the surrounding hills and seek out the narrow caves where he rested and prayed. But we return again and again to the marshy lakes, to hear chorusing frogs and watch grebes and herons. One morning Tom sees a fox trotting near the water’s edge, its red coat soaked from the dewy grass. 

Lauds

Near sunrise Tom goes out to photograph in the forest of Monteluco again. 

I go to Lauds with the friars in the old convent (pictured). 

As he walks quietly through the woods, Tom surprises a wild boar who jumps up with a startled snort and rushes off through the trees.