On the feast of St James – the patron of the greatest walking pilgrimage in the world, the Camino di Santiago – I set off on the newly minted Camino di San Benedetto, 200 miles on foot through the heartland of Italy. It begins in Norcia, the birthplace of St Benedict, and ends in the place where he died (and is buried) 1,500 years ago, a mountain-top spiritual fortress, the abbey of Monte Cassino.
From the first day to the last, every minute was filled with prayer, history and beauty, whether natural or artistic. My rosary never left my hand. I had a heavy pack, slept in the woods and had bad shoes – and hence, of necessity, walked with a penitential spirit.
Leaving the medieval walls of Norcia, I ducked into the woods in the mountains, with its oak forests, wild boar and hay fields. The first lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy echoed in my ears: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura (“When half way through the journey of our life I found that I was in a gloomy wood”). Like Dante’s, this was a spiritual journey.
On the other side of the mountain, after sleeping out with shooting stars streaking through the night sky above me, as I came down a pass, the hill town of Cascia, with its churches and stone houses, popped up into view.
Every day was filled with prayer, mountain beauty and ancient hill towns, with intense and often profound conversations with the people I met on the way. When trekking long distances, the mind is not inclined to chit-chat.
After the long walk through the mountains and forests between towns, I would find a Mass in the nearest church, drop down in a pew, exhausted, and pray my heart out.
The alluring dimmed light of a trail in the woods entices even at dawn. Far, far away, down a valley, sheep graze in the distance, looking like specks of dust on a mirror as the golden light of the rising sun hits the mountain, engulfed in deepest green where the rays have not yet gilded it.
You wouldn’t know they were sheep except for the distant musical chiming of their bells, the valley conveying the now small sound into a subtle tinkle. The way the sheep cling to the mountainside, it seems they should tumble down into the valley below.
You stand there, enraptured by the glory of the scene before you, the music of the heavenly spheres ringing in your ears. Aesthetic ecstasies such as these fill your days.
The transition from oak forests to pine was dramatic: the forest suddenly turning from robust horizontal to sky-scraping vertical. From the earthy, moss covered smells of the oak, the pine’s wonderful perfume suddenly pervades the air. Sheepdogs slept in the shade as their herds grazed in the distance, the bells ringing about their necks.
Newborn calves raised themselves from the tall grass for the first time. Once, at night, wild boars surrounded me in a lonely meadow in a brief but intense standoff. As I mastered the fear pumping adrenalin through my chest, they scampered away into the brush.
Seeing a Romanesque church or secluded monastery, I plunged in to see what I could find. Delighted by the delicate play of light in the dimly lit churches, with faint but colourful frescoes of remote epochs hanging upon the walls, I then slipped past the intricately carved figures on the stone portals to see what else these ancient towns had to offer. This was repeated daily, exploring a medieval hill town, with stone houses and a castle huddled around an ancient church, walking back in time.
The vast variety of flowers – pink, blue and red – and aromatic herbs like wild mint in the clearings, made my tent a royal bedchamber. I hiked up through the chestnut trees to see the ruins of Horace’s villa, walked through the stones of the basilica built on top of what remains of Cicero’s home, and climbed the mountain to Aquinas’s castle. Shooting stars, the tears of St Lawrence, exploded in the sky above the spot where Thomas was born.
At the end of the pilgrimage, I got down on my knees in the glorious baroque basilica of Monte Cassino, sitting on its mountain perch among the clouds, clad in precious marbles, white like a cloud on the outside and, within, a rainbow.
As I crawled to the tomb of St Benedict and St Scholastica, the physical pain turned my mind to the underlying spiritual burden I was carrying: the prayer intentions I had collected from friends and found in my own heart along the trail. Before the tomb, the tears ran down my face, tears of joy for the intimacy with God and creation I was living, and of sadness that the pilgrimage was over.
Returning to Norcia, the biggest earthquake in decades shook us from our beds in the middle of the night, sending me running back to Rome and eventually destroying the thousand-year-old basilica of St Benedict. Following in Benedict’s steps, you see with your own eyes, however, that his way of life transcends finite dwellings built by human hands.
Evan Simpkins is a journalist and Aristotelian scholar based in Rome
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