On his tour of southern Tuscany Edward Hutton visited the famous monastery of Monte Oliveto. Even though the frescoes of the life of St. Benedict by Signorelli and Sodoma remain, he believed that those frescoes are an impeachment of "the wanton stupidity that has drained away the life of such a place in mere barbarian revenge."
Moreover, on the road from Asciano to Monte Oliveto there is much of great beauty in the landscape beside the beauty of the desert. There is the majestic loveliness, the incomparable outline of Mont’ Amiata, the bizarre and haggard splendour of Radicofani, and both these wonders burst upon one suddenly and dramatically after climbing the longest hill some halfway to the monastery.
There are many outlines of surpassing splendour in Italy; there are the hills of Cortona as seen from Montepulciano, there are Monte Cimino and Monte Venere as seen from Abbadia S. Salvatore, there are the hills of Vallombrosa as seen from Vincigliata, the whole splendour of Val d’Arno as seen from Empoli, and the Monte Pisani as seen from the leaning tower of Pisa; but there is no other outline that I have seen, even in my dreams, that may compare with that of Mont’ Amiata as seen from three different points—the Porta Romano of Siena, the platform behind the Cathedral of Pienza, and the desert hillside between Asciano and Monte Oliveto. Modern Italy has wantonly destroyed half her patrimony in a kind of pique, to humour fools or to mark what she conceives to be her “progress,” whither no one knows; but not yet has she thought or been able to destroy much of the superhuman loveliness with which God has endowed her…. (180)
But if one seeks destruction one has not far to go for it—only, indeed, as far as the monastery itself, hidden away among the worst precipices of the desert, which here the monks had made to blossom like a rose.
The great block of brick buildings which form the monastery, with its church, cloisters, and conventual houses, are the centre of a venerable oasis in this bare country, of an oasis which little by little the desert is claiming again. For the place is no longer a monastery, the monks having been deprived by the jealous Italian Government not only of the fruits of their labours, the houses they had built, the smiling garden they had contrived in the desert, but the right to labout at all. Nor in robbing them has modern Italy seen fit herself to fill their place. Her policy has been, here as elsewhere, that of a mere anarchist, eager in destruction, but too often careless or incapable of construction, or even, as here, of carrying on the good work of the monks she has robbed … (180-1)
The loss is Italy’s and ours; for while we as mere travellers may still find here the hospitality we seek, the Italian contadino and labourer are deprived of their employers; the land carefully and labouriously redeemed and cultivated by the monks has been lost, and a host of people left without employment/ It is a striking spectacle, not uncommon in Italy, where the true Italians, the common people, have been more ruthlessly exploited by the middle classes, the bagmen from Piedmont, and all the riff-raff of the risorgimento, than anywhere else in Europe. (181)…
The last Abbot of Monte Oliveto, the holy and courageous Abbate di Negro, of the family of s. Catherine of Genoa, died in 1897. He remembered the now empty cloister and choir, filled by fifty white-robed monks. And then the peasants sang in the vineyards, and the corn was golden in July and reaped with joy, and the whole country-side was glad in those days. And now? – well, now there is only a horrid silence. * (184)
* Note: The Olivetani have been suppressed almost everywhere, like the rest of the Orders. Their General now lives in the little monastery of Settignano. May they long be left in peace. ###
Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.
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