Eremo Francescano di Campello

Atop the Colle di San Benedetto above the Clitunno springs, a small Romanesque church, a Sullan-era tomb and a ruined watch tower anchor a Franciscan hermitage revived in 1926 by Sister Maria di Campello, whose community of "larks" continues its Franciscan life.

Why it matters

The hermitage above the springs is the Clitunno valley's oldest continuous story of retreat. Its roots reach to around the year one thousand, with the first secure records in the trecento, and tradition holds that Saint Francis and Saint Bernardino of Siena prayed here; beneath the buildings, a cave adapted for eremitical life is associated with hermits said to have come from Syria. In the twentieth century the site acquired a second, rarer distinction: Sister Maria di Campello, who settled here with her first companions in 1926, made the hermitage a point of contact between contemplative life and some of the defining figures of her age, corresponding with Albert Schweitzer and meeting Mahatma Gandhi in Rome in 1931. Few Umbrian hermitages join medieval fabric and a documented modern spiritual history so tightly.

What to notice

The complex includes a small cloister, the remains of a tower, a Roman tomb of the Sullan era, and the small church of the trecento with austere Romanesque lines. A garden path, the "via della pace", leads to a stone altar forming the Chapel of the Transfiguration and, at the highest point on the tower's remains, a small cell of total solitude; from there the view crosses the Umbrian valley toward Assisi and Perugia. Restored after the 1997 earthquake, the buildings wear their age without theatricality.

Context and history

The medieval community faded over the centuries, and by the time Valeria Pignetti — Sister Maria, a former Franciscan Missionary of Mary who had left her congregation in 1919 seeking a poorer life — found the site in 1923, it was nearly a ruin. In 1926 the first five sisters climbed up, and the community became known as the Allodole, the larks, of Saint Francis. Sister Maria's openness drew suspicion from ecclesiastical authority in the 1930s, yet her circle crossed confessional lines and reached far beyond Umbria; she lived at the hermitage until her death in 1961. The hermitage's history joins its medieval origins to Sister Maria's twentieth-century community.