Montecassino

 

 

Edward Hutton brought "Naples and Campania Revisited" to an end with visits to three great monasteries, LaCava, Montevergine, and Montecassino. Below is his reflection on Montecassino, including an appendix detailing the destruction caused by the Italian campaign in 1944. During the war Hutton had served with the British army advising on which cultural and historical sites to avoid bombing. Apparently, his advice was not taken on Montecassino. 

Another and a greater abbey than La Cava, the great abbey of Montecassino, the greatest and the most ancient in Europe, stands on a mountain top in Campania Felice, 1.500 feet above the sea, about half way between Naples and Rome. It was the cradle of the Benedictine Order and dates from the first third of the sixth century…. (233)

 

Such was the abbey as I remembered it, all of which was seemingly swept away by the Allies in 1944. And as I climbed the long hill, crowned as I saw with new buildings, I wondered what I was going to find at the top.

 

Well, what I found was a reproduction as near as might be of the abbey that was destroyed in 1944. I suppose the monks were so deeply attached  to the destroyed buildings that they could not forgo reproducing them. Yet, though I could well understand this very natural sentimentality, I thought it unfortunate, for there was nothing of any artistic distinction in the buildings that were destroyed….

 

Every traveller to South Italy should come to Montecassino if only because of the immense influence  it has had in the history of Europe and indeed of mankind. Fourteen hundred years ago and more S. Benedict founded here the cradle of that Order of monks which transformed Europe, cut down its impenetrable forests, drained its impassable marshes, educated its barbarians and made them Christians. It was the monks of S. Benedict who converted the English, supplied the country with statesmen, counsellors and bishops and presently covered England with mighty houses, Glastonbury, Reading, Durham, and the like, to be utterly destroyed by a reckless and unhappy king, yet are now rising again, so that it is today possible to land at Dover, cross the country to the Atlantic, and sleep at a Benedictine monastery every night.

 

As you lie there on that mountain-side before the abbey newborn, looking over the deep valley where the Liri wanders under Aquino and Pontecorvo and I know not how many other ancient cities groved and garlanded with the ilex, the olive and the vine, where beyond, rises range after range of purple mountain chain, you may think on these things. (239)…

 

APPENDIX III. SOME OF THE CHURCHES DAMAGED IN CAMPANIA IN THE WAR, 1939-1945.

 

Perhaps the destruction of Montecassino was the most shocking moral outrage of the war in Italy, Mr. Majdalany points out in his excellent book (Cassino: Portrait of a Battle [1957]} that the Allied Command seems to have been astonished at the difficulties that faced our armies at Cassino, yet the Italian Military College had used Cassino for generations as an example of an impregnable defense barrier. In the tremendous and relentless bombing of the great monastery the Cathedral church was the first to be attacked and destroyed.  What was achieved by the destruction of the famous monastery? According to Mr. Majdalany, who took part in the attack. It “achieved nothing”, but the tenth German Army was able “to establish posts in the Abbey ruins”.

 

It might seem that the whole Italian campaign was a mistake, misconceived and eventually starved to death. The mere idea of waging modern war up the length of the peninsula through the beautiful cities which hold treasures of architecture, painting and sculpture, the inheritance of mankind, should, I imagine, have given pause to even the most philistine and obsessed political leader. It was, one regrets to recall, an English proposal. The Americans, merely for military reasons, disliked the Italian diversion, and Eisenhower finally brought it to an end by draining it of troops and material for the invasion of Normandy. (275-276)

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 235-239, 275-276.