Monastero di Santa Croce del Corvo

Among olive groves on the Caprione ridge above Bocca di Magra, Santa Croce del Corvo has served as a Benedictine hermitage, medieval priory, neo-Gothic estate and, since 1952, a house of the Discalced Carmelites. Its chapel holds one of Liguria's oldest wooden sculptures, overlooking the sea and Apuan Alps.

Why it matters

The monastery's own history page records its foundation on 2 February 1176, when the Bishop of Luni, Pipino, granted land to a monk to build a house dedicated to the Holy Cross and to Nicodemus. After a failed start the community passed in 1186 to the Pulsanesi congregation, a Benedictine observance linked to Pisa, and the site grew into a monastic estate commanding the Magra mouth. Two features make it unusual on this coast. The first is the Crocifisso Tunicato, a clothed wooden crucifix carved from elm trunks, dated by scholars between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which gave the monastery its name of Santa Croce. The second is its continuity of purpose: after centuries of abandonment and private ownership, the property was bought in 1952 by Carmelite Anastasio Ballestrero, later a cardinal, to establish a centre of spirituality and hospitality.

What to notice

The wrought-iron entrance gate bears the initials of the Fabbricotti family and a Carmelite crest. The Castello, a nineteenth-century turreted house clad in portoro marble, contains hospitality and conference rooms, two chapels and maiolica works by ceramicist Angelo Biancini. Stone stations of a Via Crucis descend through the garden past the old Chalet, formerly a coffee house and fumoir. The chapel of the Holy Cross stands beside the Antico Conventino, the ruined medieval core with its old lookout bell tower; it holds the tunicate crucifix, and a plaque records the tradition of Dante's passage here. The Fortino Santa Maria, once the Cardinal's quarters, preserves his everyday rooms.

Context and history

The medieval house declined with the fourteenth-century wars and was abandoned around the middle of the Trecento, whereupon the crucifix was moved to Sarzana for safety. Devotion returned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a chapel was built over the old apse to restore the crucifix to the site and hermits were lodged in the transept. Suppression passed the property to the state and then to the Carrara marble entrepreneur Carlo Andrea Fabbricotti, who adapted the surviving convent as a residence and erected beside it a neo-Gothic castle-palace completed in 1898 within a landscaped park. In 1935 ownership moved to the Monte dei Paschi bank; the Second World War left the buildings looted and half-ruined after German occupation. Ballestrero's 1952 purchase began the recovery of the monastery.