A weekend in Norcia

We finished our paleography course this Friday. Our second course will focus on the manuscripts written in the 'Beneventan' script, produced in the Duchy of Benevento from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. The center of production was the Abbey of Montecassino, founded by St. Benedict in the sixth century. It lies on the main route from Naples to Rome and occupies a strategic position on a mountain overlooking the highway. It has been destroyed many times over the centuries, most recently in 1944, but it has always been rebuilt. It is the well spring of Western monasticism, so it is an important site for the history of farming, education, culture, and Western civilization generally. Northern Europe is European because of the work of the Benedictines. As historians like to say, what the Romans could not conquer with the sword, the Benedictines conquered with the book and the plough.

Partly to connect my upcoming trip to Montecassino to the wider context of Benedict's life and partly to fulfill my longstanding intention of visiting the monastic community at Norcia, I planned a short pilgrimage with Tom Santamaria, a friend from class. We left immediately after our final exam on Friday, walking across Rome at top speed in the heat of the day to arrive at Termini Station about seven minutes before the train left! We zoomed out of Rome, and within minutes were in the countryside of Latium. After about fifteen minutes, the foothills of the Apennines began to rise out of the farmland and continued to grow as we made our way to Spoleto. When we arrived at Spoleto, we had about an hour before our bus left, so we went in search of water and gelato, the two indispensable necessities of weary travelers. After three weeks in Rome, we had come to expect a gelateria on every corner, but Spoleto seemed only to have bars with prepackaged ice cream sandwiches in chest freezers, like one finds in a gas station. After some twenty minutes, we were successful, finding a gelateria with flavors we had never seen before. I had Rocher, nocciola (hazelnut) flavored gelato with bits of Ferrero Rocher candies mixed in. This flavor mixes two of my favorite things, putting hazelnut and chocolate together with more chocolate and hazelnut. I imagine that a bacon-crackling sandwich would be similar.

We finished out gelati and headed back to the train station. Our bus ride took a leisurely, meandering path through the mountains, with signs to places like Assisi and Cascia. I suppose St. Benedict is not the only saint to have come from Umbria. When I say 'mountains,' you may be imagining the Rockies or Sierra Nevadas, but these are more like the Ozarks; ever-present, but attaining to no great height. You can imagine hiking up in the morning to have a picnic lunch on the summit.

We arrived in Norcia after a 90 minute bus ride. The sky was blue and the hills green. It reminded me of southern Germany, but greener. Norcia is a postcard perfect medieval walled city, like Rothenburg, but with all the sharp edges rounded off due to the influence of the Italian spirit and the baroque impulse. The local economy revolves around truffles, cheese, lentils, and prosciutto. Probably due to their dual purpose as truffle hunters and sausage ingredient, there are depictions of pigs everywhere in the town. Every shop is decorated with boar's heads. The prosciutto comes from wild boars hunted in the mountains surrounding Norcia. Truffles are collected in season and preserved in myriad ways. I did not see any land flat enough to farm, but Umbria is famous for its dairy and legumes, so it must have been hiding between the mountains.

When we arrived, the monks had just finished vespers. Br. Ignatius, the guest master, welcomed us, gave us breviaries and missals, and told us the schedule. Since we had missed dinner, we went to a restaurant. I ate a sandwich on the way to the train station in Rome and was not particularly hungry, so I had 'antipasti al tartufo,' which consisted of bruschetta, a frittata, and some prosciutto, all covered in truffles. I finished off a long day of travel with panna cotta, which is a bit like flan but has more the texture of sour cream. We then headed back to our room.

Tom's father spent some time as a benedictine novice, and Tom grew up hearing about monastic life but had never been to a monastery before. He wanted the full experience, so we got up at 3:30 for Matins and followed the hours throughout the day straight through compline. Despite having visited Clear Creek many times, I had never before gone to Matins. I have often struggled to understand how it works by trying to read the breviary but never had much success. I think that may have scared me away from attending (and the fact that I usually sleep until 6). Now it all makes sense. Becky is right. There are some things you have to experience and can't just read about. This all makes me suspicious of historicism. I am comfortable with the history of ideas and the history of institutions, but I wonder about social history. I am reminded of the varied interpretations of the Minoans, whose language remains undeciphered and whose artifacts have been used to paint portraits of an enlightened, pacifist, matriarchy as well as a brutal, infanticidal and cannibalizing tyranny based of human sacrifice. But I digress. The family of St. Benedict is alive and well, and we can experience their life if person.

The monks' day centers on prayer and work, 'ora et labora' to use St. Benedict's injunction for his sons. Time is reckoned according to the ancient system of hours and watches, so that the first hour, prime, is at sunrise. Before prime, there are matins (morning prayer) and lauds (praises). Throughout the day, there are little hours, terce, sext, and none, which punctuate periods of work. Vespers comes in the evening, and compline finishes the day a few hours after sunset. The heart of this regimen of prayer, the Divine Office, is the chanting of the Psalms, arranged so that all 150 are recited in one week. This practice has roots in ancient Jewish practice; Christ and the Twelve sang the 'Hillel' Psalms before the Last Supper, and pious Jews still recite the Siddur on a model not far different from the Christian Divine Office.

The monks put me to work in the kitchen washing dishes. They have a commercial setup that reminded me of working for Linda Godwin long ago. I believe she will be happy to know that my speed and efficiency have improved since then. I also had the job of breaking down boxes and compacting plastic bottles. The cool mountain air was so dry that I ended my work with several nasty paper cuts. I suppose my skin had gotten used to the heat and humidity of Rome.

Monk food.

My labor was rewarded with a hearty lunch and a bottle of the monks' beer. The food reminded me of Clear Creek but with much more olive oil, garlic, and salt. The food was all vegetarian, but I was certainly not left hungry. Like Clear Creek, I can always recognize the ingredients, but I can never name what I am eating. For instance, you might say you are having hamburgers for dinner. This means that you will be eating ground beef patties on buns with assorted condiments, fresh vegetables, and cheese. If you didn't know what a hamburger was, you might have trouble putting it into words. My favorite thing I ate was zucchini stuffed with canned tuna and garlic served with sautéed carrots. Even though I can't name it, I hope to make it sometime in the future. Eating this way probably comes from the practice of cooking from the garden and using whatever ingredients are to hand. Before Becky reined in my culinary creativity, I often tried to do the same, and I made something delicious about a third of the time with the rest ranging from edible to compost. This is in no way to say that monastic food is bad. Their food is always more than edible, and it has always been great, wholesome food - I just don't know what it is!

After lunch, we went down into the house where Sts. Benedict and Scholastica were born. The building dates from the first century, and although you probably cannot tell from my picture, it has some nice opus reticulatum. St. Benedict was born in 480, a few years after 476, when historians date the fall of the Western Roman Empire. His family was well-off and sent him to Rome for his education. As far as I know, he never returned. He left Rome for the wilderness of central Italy, living for a time as a hermit in a cave near Subiaco. He realized the difficulty of hermitage and founded a community of coenobites (from the Greek for 'people-who-live-in-common.' Koine (coene) is the 'common' dialect of Greek, and -bites is related to the word 'bios' from which are derived 'biology' and 'biography.') His community became the model for monasticism in the West, while the East has preserved the primitive emphases on asceticism and withdrawal to the desert in imitation of Christ's forty days of single combat with Satan. The Rule is a gentler path, designed, as St. Benedict says, for beginners. It is characterized by stability, moderation, and sobriety. You can understand how Benedictine foundations, working slowly and steadily, tamed the wilds of Northern Europe and endured until the secularizing impulse of the nineteenth century.

The monks of Norcia are a relatively new community. The basilica and parts of the monastery are romanesque, but the community was suppressed by Napoleon in 1810. In 1999, Fr. Cassian Folsom began chanting the office in a garage with a few friends, and two years later, the Bishop of Spoleto-Norcia invited his small community to take over the basilica. The community now numbers just under twenty. They service a constant stream of pilgrims and visitors from all over the world, and in 2012, they began brewing beer. Br. Evagrius, who hails from Montana, said that a group from Norcia went to the Trappist abbeys in Belgium on a fact-finding mission and came back with recipes for their award-winning beer. They have been renovating the monastery bit by bit since they moved in, and they have recently commissioned Fabrizio Diomedi, an artist from Orvieto, to paint frescos in their refectory in the Umbrian style, which combines aspects of Byzantine, Gothic, and early Renaissance traditions. I have long wanted to learn to write icons, but I have been reluctant to work in the Byzantine tradition since I am a Western Christian. I remember reading an article by David Clayton wherein he discussed his own journey towards becoming an iconographer. He wrote that his true love was for the Gothic, but finding no master, he learned the Byzantine style. It seems that Fabrizio Diomedi is the master for whom Clayton was searching. Perhaps I need to find a way to finance several months in Orvieto...

Blue sky. Green mountain. Walled City. Prosciutto: Norcia