Web: (Italian-only click on "Accoglienza").Ĭost: €57 per person full board (€50 for 3 nights)All meals are included with your stay, and dinnertime puzzles the guests together randomly at tables so small you’re forced to make conversation, which is part of the point. Tel.: +39-0575-5341 (best to call is when the desk is reliably staffed: 9am–noon and 4 –6pm) The 72 guest rooms along arcaded cloisters and adjacent halls are as austere as you'd expect-tiny chambers with formica floors, aging modular furnishing units, and a crucifix on the wall-but each is heated and comes with a tiny private bathroom.Īdd.: Chiusi della Verna, off the SS 208 from Bibbena
Visitors-of any faith, or none-are welcome to stay in the Foresteria.
They make their way silently though the stone streets, on their way to sing the calls to hours (guests are welcome to attend) in a main church and a dozen chapels decorated with blue-and-white glazed terracotta sculptures by the famous Renaissance della Robbia clan. Time is measured by the silent processions of white-robed monks. La Verna remains a place out of time, a cluster of medieval stone buildings perched atop a forbidding cliff often shrouded in morning mist.
The story has drawn pilgrims and tourists, the faithful and the merely curious, to the Santuario della Verna monastery that sprang up around the miraculous cave between the 13th and 15th centuries. This scene, which sealed Francis's saintliness, has been reproduced in countless frescoes and altarpieces across Tuscany. Suddenly, a heavenly seraphim appeared and bestowed upon him the holiest of all saintly afflictions: the stigmata, miraculous wounds replicating those suffered by Christ on the Cross. In the autumn of 1224, on a mountain in the Casentino hills between Florence and Arezzo, the monk the world would soon know as St.
It is a gorgeous little monastic hamlet (top) with simple rooms (middle not pictured: my decor, which consisted of a crucifix above the bed) in a special guest wing of arcaded Renaissance corridors (bottom). The monastery of La Verna in Tuscany, Italy, was built on the clifftop site where St.