Eremo francescano "Le Celle"

Where a mountain stream cuts a narrow gorge below Cortona, Francis of Assisi found in 1211 the three things he sought: water, rock and a cleft in the stone. The hermitage of Le Celle grew around that cave cell, and Capuchin friars still pray there today.

Why it matters

Franciscan Tuscany has many shrines, but few places where the physical contact with the historical Francis is this direct. Preaching in Cortona, Francis asked a young nobleman, Guido Vagnottelli, for a deserted spot where he could withdraw to pray — and chose this gorge because its features seemed to echo the Gospel: water as living water, rock as Christ the stone, and a fissure in the mountain recalling the wounds of the Lord. He returned in 1215 for Easter and again in 1226, the year of his death, when tradition holds that he meditated on or began his Testament here. A community has guarded the place almost without interruption since the Capuchins arrived in 1537, and the friars of the Fraternità Cappuccina still live and pray on the site. This is an inhabited hermitage, not a monument.

What to notice

The architecture responds to the form of the gorge. At the core stands the masonry cell and oratory that Brother Elias, Minister General of the Order and a Cortonese, built in 1235 around the saint's cave, with a small refectory and five tiny cells above sized to match the holy man's own. The Capuchins' seventeenth-century additions climb the rock in tiers: the convent church with its single nave, and a corridor running parallel to the mountain lined with cells of barely two metres by two. Inside the church, note the large dark wooden altar of 1695 by Remigio of Florence framing a Madonna and Child with Saints painted by Giovanni Marracci of Lucca in 1694, the chapel of Saint Felice da Cantalice frescoed with a work attributed to Simone Pignoni, and a wooden Deposition of 1632 in the refectory. The chapel of Saint Francis marks the point where architecture yields to rock.

Context and history

The hermitage passed from the friars to the diocese after about a century and stood nearly deserted for two hundred years — a pause that saved its solitude. In 1537 the bishop called the Capuchins, the Franciscan reform approved in 1528, to revive the place, and Le Celle became the novitiate of the Tuscan province for roughly five centuries, its rigorous cell design a deliberate return to Francis's severity. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries brought quieter change: the community now describes its work as a house of prayer offering hospitality, silence and fraternity, and in 2024 a new crucifix icon was blessed for the cell to mark the eighth centenary of the stigmata. The hermitage belongs to the small chain of Franciscan sites that give Cortona its spiritual map, from the church of San Francesco in town to the basilica of Santa Margherita on the hill.