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Feeling Alive in the Long Ago:
It is not necessary to be religious to experience a profound spirituality in a visit to San Galgano, a soaring Gothic ruin not far off the Firenze to Siena highway, nor to Sant'Antimo, a small romanesque abbey church in what was, in the middle ages, a thriving Benedictine monastery, nestled in a grove of ancient olive trees in a quiet valley near Montalcino. A pagan would feel the living soul of nature in either place, and you do not have to be a student of history to enjoy the miraculous sensation that you are simultaniously alive in a vivid present and in an equally vivid long ago.
Galgano Guidotti was a twelfth century nobleman and warrior knight who renounced a life of "arrogance, lust, and violence" and chose to live as a pious hermit. The abbey church that honors him must once have been magnificent and filled with color - gold, polished wood, the glory of stained glass. Now as you enter the grey stone vastness, the only colors you see are the green grass under your feet and the blue sky above you. You explore the great nave and the side aisles, speculate that you are standing where the organ pipes rose or where the choir lifted their voices, but your eyes are drawn, again and again, to emptiness - to the great pointed arches of the windows. The greatest takes your breath away, drawing your gaze upward behind the rough stone altar that stands where the great altart once stood. And whether its expanse frames a blue and sun-lit sky or one grey with nist, you feel very much alive.
We once found a circlet of ivy, red berries, and marguerites, a white tulle veil attached, on the corner of the altar. The little girl who wore it must have made her first communion - where? At the adjacent Montesiepi chapel? She could not have been gone long, for the white daisies were still fresh. Had she placed the wreath reverently on this altar, or tossed it aside to run after the other children?
Ouside you may notice that in a tiny, slightly unkempt garden watched over by a statue of the Virgin, a roughly engraved stone pronounces it the most beautiful garden in the world. You may sit on a stone wall and watch a group of children, released from the strictures of decorous behavior inside the church, kicking a soccer ball on the grass. Turn your head to look at the fields that tell you that twenty-first century rural life is there, right at the edge of San Galgano's ground.
You can walk or drive up the winding road to the small round Montesiepi chapel. Inside, the central object, in a glass case, is San Galgano's sword thrust into a rock - his act of renunciation. You may accept or reject the accompanying legend; I suggest a willing suspension of disbelief. An attendant will unlock the door to a small room, and the deposit of a euro into a slot will illunimate frescoes attributed to Lorenzetti - among them, a drawing for an Annunciation in which Mary is a frightened girl clinging to a pillar, and the redone finished product in which she is majestic. You will like the first one more. The light lasts only a few minutes, before they return to the protective dark. When we were last there the attendant was an elderly woman who also cared for the Abandonati - cats and kittens who had been dumped there.
No one feels like a stranger at San Galgano.
There is no bad time of day to visit Sant' Antimo: it is lighted at night and glimmers in the dark. On a sunny day you might sit on the grass outside the church, examining the gnarled, silvery olive trees whose history is recorded in the shiny ends of countless lopped off trunks and branches and the haphazard pattern of resultant new growth. At a little distance stands the old stone buidling that houses a handful of Benedictine monks, living icons of Sant'Antimo's medieval past.
Inside, all is white plaster and dark wood, simple pews. Behind the altar the enormous window is filled with clear glass so that, like San Galgano, you can look through it and see what the weather is. A glass case protects a carved and painted Madonna and Child, a little grotesque, as Jesus's face looks like a grown man's. On the back wall hangs a large painting of Christ on the Cross, his face agonized. One of the pillars is topped with a stone carving of Daniel in the Lion''s Den. In this church you do not find the color, extravagance, high art of the late middle ages: the sanctity here is stern and spare, reminding you of suffering, not of glorious ascent.
The handfull of monks still enter the church to chant the canonical hours - Lauds, Third Mass, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline - and that is an experience not to miss. We sat one mid-afternoon at Sext, keeping ourselves of sober mien out of respect for the two or three elderly ladies in black head scarves attending the service. Actually, we were quite excited. A bell rang, and the white-robed monks entered from a side door and filed noiselessly across to the choir benches, heads bowed and hands clasped. After a few minutes they begain to chant. The quiet rhythms, monotones punctuated by slight ascents and descents in the scale, did not fill the little church but seemd rather to hover in the air. One of the monks had a cold. His muffled coughs and sneezes may have disrupted the harmony of their voices, but it put us vividly in the long ago, when in the rainy season there must have been endless head colds caught in their damp, chilly monastic cells.
Our secret - In Tuscany, visiting churches can be a lving personal experience, not a dutiful but dull obedience to the guidebook
