Italy, part one: Hospitality and the Rule of St. Benedict - The Abbey of Tre Fontane, Rome

*note: as is customary when I have been travelling, I have fallen a bit behind in my writing.  Rather than writing a huge blog post, I will instead publish it in several instalments.

A 15th-century copy of the Rule of St. Benedict

Italy, part one: The Abbey of Tre Fontane, Rome
November 4th, 2018

I had a busy day yesterday in Rome, beginning with a very early morning start: Maggie and I were up at around 4 am to drive to Charleroi, and I was in the air by 7h05, and on the ground in Rome Ciampino two hours later.

Unfortunately the bus trip into Vatican City took around the same amount of time, so when I spotted the length of the lines to get into the Vatican Museum, I was a little discouraged… everywhere around the Vatican there are storefronts that sell “skip the line” tickets and guided tours.  At one of these tour companies, I started a conversation with Judge, a nice fellow from Nigeria who had quite good English.  As it turns out he lived for a while in Ghent, but has been in Rome for about five years.  He told me that the skip the line tickets should be purchased several days ahead of time if one wants to get an early start; yesterday the only ones still available were for 15h30, and as I knew the Abbey gates were going to close at 17h30, and it was almost an hour away by transit, I’d need to start much earlier.  Guided tours are usually not something I am interested in, but there was one available starting at 13h30 so I bought a ticket for that.

While I was waiting for the tour to start, I went to a nearby beer café called Trapizzino and had a glass of Rebel’s Serial Tripel, brewed by a Roman microbrewery in the Belgian style, and a pizza-ish snacky thing that was stuffed with lingua con salsa verde, cold beef tongue in green sauce.  It was delicious, and was enough to keep me going for a while.  Then I stashed my bag in a locker around the corner and went to meet the rest of the participants for the tour.

It was led by a tiny Italian woman with dark hair and big round glasses.  Think “Edna Mode (of the Incredibles) does the Vatican Museum” and you’d have a good idea of how it went.

The wait time to get into the museum itself was interminable; apparently “skip the line” is not meant to be taken literally.  The Vatican museum is packed to the rafters with people and there was very little time to stop and reflect on any of the artwork, with a very few exceptions.  I am sad that I missed the Apollo Belvedere statue, but my interest was taken instead with the famous Laocoon statue, where the priest and his sons struggle unsuccessfully with the two serpents that Athena has sent to punish him for arguing against letting the Trojan Horse in through the gates.  (Spoiler alert: the people of Troy should have listened to him).

As I said the place was so full that you didn’t really have much time to stop and reflect, but I had one moment of real amazement in the gallery of tapestries… I guess I am a real Belgian now, as I was deeply touched by the Resurrection of Christ tapestry.  This is one of a series made by Pieter van Aelst, and made in Flanders, based on drawings by pupils of Raphael, and first shown in the Sistine Chapel in 1531.  The looks of astonishment and rue on the faces of the Roman guards as the risen Christ emerges from the tomb are vivid and evocative.  One almost gets the sense that the powerfully built Jesus has “blown” the door down, and he’s standing on it in a commanding stance, while his face is calm and intense.  Amazingly, his eyes seem to follow you as you pass the tapestry.  Really a gorgeous piece of art.  It's astonishing to me that something so immediately accessible is over 500 years old.

The Sistine Chapel is of course amazing, and I would have liked to have had more time to study it, but they really move people through there briskly.  But I guess that was a good thing… as it was I had to really hoof it to get back to my locker and hop on the Metro to get to Tre Fontane before it closed.

The view from just inside the gate at Tre Fontane

I ended up walking the last kilometer and a half from the Metro station to the abbey, and already noticed the difference in ambiance and noise level, just a few kilometres outside of the city centre.  The roadway is bordered on both sides by many large trees, and the air at sunset was smelling very fresh and perfumed with eucalyptus.  As I drew neared to the monastery, I passed some signs for a cave, indicating that a rather famous miracle of the twentieth century had taken place… This cave is the setting for the miracle of the Virgin of Revelation; it is where Bruno Cornacchiola and his children saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1947.

The history of this miracle is interesting.  It would seem that Cornacchiola, a Seventh-Day Adventist, had for many years cultivated a deep hatred of the Catholic Church.  He had vowed to murder the pope, even going so far as to buy a dagger and engraving the words “Death to the Pope” upon the handle, and he was planning to carry out the assassination in September of 1947.

The story goes that one Saturday morning in April of that same year he was visiting the Abbey of Tre Fontane to buy some chocolate for his children.  He rested for a while under the eucalyptus trees, and was reviewing a virulently anti-Catholic speech that he was to give that afternoon, ridiculing the idea of the Immaculate Conception.  His children had been playing at the entrance to a nearby cave, and at some point he found them inside the cave, entranced by a vision, which he also came to see.  Cornacciola claimed that the vision was of the Virgin Mary, who admonished him for persecuting her, and he experienced an immediate conversion to Catholicism that persisted for the rest of his life.  This story of the vision became quite famous, and soon afterwards he even met the Pope to personally ask for forgiveness.  For Catholics the miracle at the cave has now become far more famous than the Abbey itself.  But as it was already getting late, I didn’t have time to stop there but continued on…

The Rule of St. Benedict is a book of precepts written by Benedict of Nursia (480–550 CE) for monks living communally under the authority of an abbot.  The 53rd chapter discusses the welcoming of guests, and it was by this principle that I was planning to visit the Abbey.  I had emailed them ahead of time and they had agreed to welcome me for a visit.  So with a light heart I entered the Arch of Charlemagne which serves as the Abbey entrance, and made my way to the courtyard that is bounded on two sides by two churches and on the third by a long wall.  I asked at the Abbey shop where the “ospitali” entrance was, and the fellow in the shop directed me to a large locked door with a buzzer.

abbey church of Saints Vincent and Anastasius

The attendant let me in, and after some ineffective attempts at communication – he only spoke Italian, not French or German, my go-to third language – he called a colleague in, who spoke perfect English.  It turns out that despite the email communications to the contrary, they had not in fact written me down in the big ledger, but that was no problem, they made a call to someone who approved my stay.  The cost for doing such a spiritual retreat is 35 EUR a day for a simple room, with bathroom, and simple meals are also provided.  They showed me upstairs to my room and explained how things were going to work.

the schedule in my room

from the window

I only had a few minutes to drop off my things, before going to the evening “Vespro” service at 18h.  This was followed by an evening meal at 19h, and then “Compieta e Benedizione” (Compline and Benediction) at 20h15.  In each of the services that we participated in, there were six monks singing, plus one playing a small organ, and two or three worshippers, myself included, all gathered in the abbey church of Saints Vincent and Anastasius, attached to the monastery itself.  This is accessed by a little door at the back of the church on, the courtyard, or by another interior door, usually kept locked, which leads to the main buildings of the monastery.  The central monastery is reserved for the monks, but there is an intermediate part of the complex that is not open to the public but is maintained for guests; they have perhaps half a dozen rooms that are kept there for spiritual retreat, and a dining hall for those “ospitali”.

the view from the back of the abbey church

For the dinner and breakfast it was only me and another visitor, Maria, who spoke no language other than Italian, so as you can imagine our conversation over dinner was fairly monastic in its silence.  The food was good if simple; a stir-fried broccoli dish, a spinach lasagna, some excellent bread and cheese and some delicious olive oil from the monastery production, and of course, a bottle of the Tre Fontane Tripel, flavoured with eucalyptus leaves from the gardens nearby.

The ambiance in the services was really lovely.  For much of the services the only light was from the monks’ reading lamps… after the Benediction, the lights were turned out and we sat in silence in the church for quite some time before the lights were lit again, and then we passed from the church, first receiving a blessing of holy water from the Abbot.

I tried to sing along with the monks; some of the other worshippers did so also, but the notice board that described which psalms were being sung didn’t always seem to be accurate, and the printed music for the Compline service didn’t correspond with what the monks were singing.  As well, the whole thing was in Italian, not Latin, which I certainly could have managed more easily.  I remember studying the Liturgy of the Hours in music history class, so it was really very cool to participate in singing at least a few parts of it in a monastery built in the seventh century!

This morning I got up quite early and attended my last service, the 6h45 “Lodi” service.  As this began before dawn, as the service progressed, the stained glass windows in the nave – a beautiful large one of Mary surrounded by angels, and two on either side of St. Benedict and St. Bernard – gradually became brighter and brighter. The effect was almost subliminal, a bit like watching the hands of a clock move, but it was very striking for that reason.  Slow time...

After the Lodi service I went and had breakfast with Maria, and then took my camera and did a walk around the complex.  It was quiet, with only a few visitors exploring the grounds.  Fortunately the weather was overcast but not yet raining, and the smell of the eucalyptus as I walked up the hill behind the churches was intoxicating.

First I visited the Church of Saint Mary of the Stairway to Heaven: this is where according to legend, St. Paul's prison once stood, and it is where St. Bernard is said to have had a vision while performing a Requiem Mass in the crypt.  His vision was of the souls in purgatory he was praying for ascending to heaven by a ladder—the Scala Coeli.  The steps outside of the church are also interesting; some of them have the remnants of letters and number on them, indicating to me that they were likely reused from older buildings or monuments.

The church of St. Paul at the Three Fountains is located furthest from the gates, and is the alleged site of the martyrdom of St. Paul at the orders of Emperor Nero.  The "Three Fountains" that give the church and the Abbey its name come from the legend that when Paul's severed head bounced upon the ground, three fountains of holy water sprang forth from those places where his head had landed.  The fountains are still there, but the water is not safe for drinking and so have been capped off.

Having played St. Paul in the Mendelssohn oratorio, it was very inspiring to visit the place of his martyrdom.  As well I am sure that my Catholic grandmother would have been very interested to hear about my visit to such an ancient place, with a connection to the early days of the Christian church.  I found my time in the abbey to be very peaceful and restful, and I am really very happy to have had this experience...

.... next up... visiting Rome with Kiana, Isabelle and Christophe...