Fermo and Monte Giorgio

 Edward Hutton loved the hill towns of the Marches. He was especially impressed with Fermo: "The little walled city with its curious acropolis so wonderfully lifted up above its neighbors is the queen of all this country." In nearby Monte Giorgio he found a special treasure. 

Fermo

But, after all, Fermo is to be loved not for the works of art or architecture or painting which it has to show, bur for itself, for its own beauty and nobility, its wonderful command of the glorious world in which it stands up like a great tower or bastion looking so proudly across the mountains and the sea. No one, certainly, who has ever spent a few days within its walls can leave it without a real regret. For to live within its gates is to be made a partaker of the sky, to breathe an air so large and noble that even the greatest work of art, did it possess it, would be at last unregarded while we turned to Nature itself, here for once wholly satisfying and able, without leaving us a single resentment, to absorb us into herself, to overwhelm us with her largeness, her majesty, her sweetness. Those lines of hills that lead our eyes up to the great mountains, those mysterious sweet valleys, those silver gardens of olives against the darkness of the cypresses yonder, the spaciousness of the sky where God dwells, the largeness of the earth He has surely especially blessed; where in the world shall we possess them with such completeness as here, or where shall we be made at one with them so profoundly and without an afterthought? (195-6)…

Monte Giorgio

I know not rightly how to speak of this place which I love so much, nor how to persuade him who is secure in Fermo and set down at an inn more or less furnished with modern comforts, to visit a place so humble, so poor and so holy. For holy it is. Figure to yourself a little white village shining on the hills under the stainless sky above a thousand valleys—beautiful with vineyards and olive gardens, and surrounded by hills greater than its own, crowned by villages scarcely less fair. Such is Monte Giorgio, whose heart is the convent of S. Francis, which should be one of the most famous Franciscan shrines in Italy, for it was there that the Fioretti were written by the Ugolino da Monte Giorgio, who as he looked out of the window of his cell, could see shining across this blessed country all the little holy places of the March, humble Franciscan dwellings which figure in his beautiful book: Massa, Fallerone, Penna S. Giovanni, Fermo, Monterubbiano.

The convent, as we see it to-day, is fair enough and holy still and full of manuscripts, and there and in the olive garden about the place, one may, better than anywhere else in the world, turn the pages of that matchless volume in which all the simplicity and and charm of the Middle Age which produced S. Francis lies hid, as in no other book… the Fioretti is for all, for ever—for all who may find in their hearts, even in middle life, even in old age, that something of the little child, without which no one can enter the kingdom of heaven. (196-197)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.