Last weekend I went back to Cortona, accompanied this time by a map and Rich, a fellow student. We were determined to find Le Celle, the Franciscan monastery several miles from the centro. So, fortified by a cioccolata densa (an Italian hot chocolate, bittersweet and with the consistency of pudding), we set out on our hike.
Fall has settled onto the Tuscan mountains.
At the midpoint of the hike is the Cappella Bentivoglio, a tiny stucco chapel for wayfarers and pilgrims.
Around 3:30 we arrived at Le Celle. It's built into the living rock of the mountainside, something like the cliff dwellings of the Southwest.
This is the part of the day words fail to capture. The monastery is still active, and the stillness of the place is so great I had the sense of being able to hear each individual bird's song in the surrounding forest. We came down a long brick path to a tiny chapel adjacent to the cell where St. Francis lived and meditated. He may have built it himself. If the doorway and bed (a narrow wooden plank set into the wall) are any indication, I'm taller than he was.
One cell next to the chapel is set up as something of a gift shop--with a few ten-cent postcards, icons of St. Francis, books, and tau amulets made of olive wood--but in its Franciscan way it's sort of defiantly anti-tourist and anti-capitalist: it's unstaffed, and it works on the honor system.
We roamed around the grounds and paths, occasionally hearing singing from the church behind the monastery. Here I should let the images take over, in the hopes of conveying the beauty and silence of the place.
The sun was setting over the pine trees and olive terraces when we began the hike back.
We took a different way around the city wall, climbing higher than we had on our way out. More or less at the summit we encountered the cathedral of Santa Margherita, by the light of the rising moon.
Mass was in progress, so we couldn't go in. And it was getting cold. We wound back down through Cortona's steep streets to the Piazza della Republica for another cioccolata densa.
Then, since we still had an hour to kill before catching the bus back to Arezzo, and as actors and true Franciscan pilgrims neither of us had much cash, we tried to find a bar serving free primi piatti. (It's fairly common here to order a beer and then help yourself to bruschetta, small panini, cheese, sausage, or salad.) Rich remembered that the bar in the civic theater building had primi piatti the last time he was in Cortona, so we tried it. The bar appeared to be closed, but we heard a lot of voices upstairs. We went up a level and saw trays of bruschetta and bottles of wine. The voices were still upstairs; it sounded like a gallery opening. We wondered if maybe we could blend in, look at the art for a bit, and have a few bruschette.
And that was where Clown reasserted itself in the day, because we went up another level and the first thing we saw was a mannequin in full Pulcinella garb. The exhibit was about theater design, with costume sketches and scenic designs for numerous Goldoni plays, as well as some Shakespeare and twentieth-century plays--even an Italian-language production of Long Day's Journey Into Night. We came in expecting to crash the party, and it turned out we belonged there.
The bruschette were delicious.
No comments:
Post a Comment