Suor Rossana ushered me into the workshop. “This is where we host classes in iconography,” she explained.
Despite its name, it has sometimes been difficult to spot the Basilian sites on the Cammino Basiliano. In some cases, small piles of rocks are all that remain, and one would need a divination rod and some peyote to have any hope of manifesting what once occupied those spaces. It’s easy to think, after a few weeks of walking here, that the Basilian legacy of Southern Italy, once so prominent, is taking its dying breaths.
And yet, twenty-two years ago, a vibrant new Basilian presence was born here, deep in the heart of Calabria, when Il Piccolo Eremo delle Querce was founded as a Basilian community of nuns. “When I arrived twenty-one years ago,” Suor Rossana told me in the library, “this was already here.” Always start with the library.
While the sisters offer a range of different workshops, the focus on iconography, central to Eastern Christianity, is a core part of their mission. Suor Rossana walked me over to a display that shows the evolution of an icon across eight steps, from the original wooden frame to the finished product. “Twenty layers,” she said. Before anything else happens, they apply twenty layers of white paint, ensuring a consistent, luminous backdrop. A few layers later, the first strokes of gold are applied. “It is true gold,” she stresses, not fake. “Because the icon is truth, the components must be true.” Back in the workshop, she shows me the many jars on the wall, containing all of the different colors applied to the varied icons, all of them coming from natural ingredients obtained from Greece and Northern Italy.
Suor Rossana turned to me. “The heart of the icon,” she stressed, “is the movement from dark to light.” As the icon moved through its eight stages, the initial paintings veered towards darker colors, establishing the background of the featured image. By the end, though, the golden halo leaps off the wooden panel, as though the figure existed in three dimensions.
These last two days, in their own way, have also involved the movement from dark to light. After so many days of perfect sunshine, the clouds have asserted their dominance since I departed Serra San Bruno, and the dearth of light was only compounded on that first walk by my total immersion in pine- and oak-covered hills. Even when rain showers arrived in force, the walk remained a delight, winding along old logging roads for two dozen kilometers, at least. The Cammino Basiliano website assures me that, “a wall of evaporite limestone, formed by the evaporation of seawater, will also be visible to those following the trail,” among other scenic vistas, but all I could see were black silhouettes of trees against a pure white backdrop.
Until, that is, I finally emerged from the woods to the edge of the Stilaro river valley, and saw a small, stone church take shape beneath the scrub and compact vineyards lining the hills below me. This was the 11th-century monastery of San Giovanni Theristis–much reduced and changed today, but still inhabited by a group of Romanian Orthodox monks. From the 7th century onward, many Eastern Orthodox monks made their way to Calabria, Basilian or not, and one of their most prominent members ultimately earned canonization. San Giovanni Theristis’s family originated in Stilo, a town just around the corner from the monastery, but his father was killed and his pregnant mother taken as a slave to Palermo during a Saracen raid. Giovanni was born in Sicily, but he eventually returned to Stilo on a tiny boat with neither sail nor oars, escaping capture along the way. In time, he joined a community of Basilian monks and rose to become their abbot, and also discovered a cave with an icy spring he chose to pray in. The original Wim Hof.
Following Giovanni’s death, the spring became a pilgrimage site, and a new monastery was built around it. Over the next five centuries, it became one of the most important Basilian centers in the world, with an impressive library. As with most other Greco-Byzantine communities in Southern Italy, it moved into a significant decline phase in the 16th and 17th centuries, and persistent threats from bandits caused the monks to relocate to a convent outside Stilo in 1662. By the 19th century, thanks to Napoleonic rule, it was converted into agricultural facilities. Not until 1980 was it transitioned back to a spiritual function, thanks to the intervention of a group of monks from Mount Athos.
The exterior of the church is handsome, with red bricks arranged around the exterior in elegant designs. But the skies remained overcast, delivering a persistent drizzle, and thus the whole world appeared damp and dim. The transformation, then, was all the more dramatic when I passed through the side entrance. Within, the lighting is also subdued, but the long line of icons across the far wall, the larger icons situated in the altar, and even the smaller ones embedded in the sparkling chandelier all flashed with luminescence, each halo like blazing neon. And all the while, one Romanian monk loomed in the back, making sure that the no-photo rule was respected.
History has not been as kind to another medieval complex perched atop the next hill over. While Google Maps led me to believe that this, too, had been a monastery, instead it was the Grangia dei Santissimi Apostoli, an agricultural processing center owned by San Bruno’s Certosa di Serra San Bruno. So the monastery became an agricultural site, and the agricultural site became a ruin.
Across the Stilaro River, three small towns cluster within a couple kilometers of each other. Stilo, the most beautiful of them all, sits just off route. Bivongi enjoys a riverside berth, and in the Middle Ages it thrived as a business hub with an annual fair of some significance. Pazzano, the least glamorous of the three, requires a steep ascent from Bivongi, and it also carved out a more labor-intensive existence, with a long practice of mining the steep peaks flanking the village. I had planned to only pass through here, but the priest kindly provided me with accommodation in the rectory, and the small butcher’s shop helpfully offered an array of groceries. I spent a chunk of the afternoon in the central piazza, waiting patiently for the clouds to yield the skies and reveal what I know must have been an incredible view, but they offered only the most teasing of glimpses, flashes of the towering crags looming overhead. And yet, on some level, I was satisfied.
The next morning began in total darkness. The church, already unlocked before 7am, was pitch black, but I shuffled through the pews to the altar and left the key to the rectory as requested, beneath the Word of God. There would be no easing into this walk. As soon as I left the piazza, I was climbing steps into the western crag, ascending towards the top of a peak covered in cloud and overgrowth, following the same route taken by the local pilgrimage every August 15. At one point, I glimpsed a view of Pazzano far below, the buildings catching just a flicker of morning light, but this was even less than what yesterday afternoon had offered. Finally, though, I tipped over the top of the mountain and immediately began switchbacking down the other side. The local pilgrimage site of Santa Maria della Stella awaited me, tucked deep into the peak. It’s unclear when the earliest hermitage took shape here, but by the 11th century a Byzantine monastic complex of some sort was established. In the 16th century, though, the Byzantine icons were supplanted with a statue of the Madonna della Stella, asserting a Catholic orientation that persists to this day.
The visit to the grotto involves a steep descent, taking perhaps fifty steps downward into a cleft in the rock. The surrounding light, still dim, began to fail as I plunged into the small chapel area, with a handful of pews oriented around a deeper cavern. Within was a beacon of light, the illuminated figure of the Madonna. So powerful was this light, and such a contrast was it with the surrounding darkness that the figure itself couldn’t actually be seen from a distance. I had to close the gap, push into the center of the cavern, to finally discern the truth of the scene.
As I descended on the old mule track along the ridge of Mount Mammicomito, the sky gradually lightened, even offering a few small streaks of blue, though the clouds otherwise maintained their dominance. Light would be rationed severely, yet again. I passed a goatherd with a large flock and then skirted a series of small villages that seemed more abandoned than inhabited. Citrus trees became more prominent, and I also encountered my first peach trees. An old man chatted with me near a small, locked church about a resident of Swiss heritage. Every time I tell people where I’ve walked from, they assume I’m Swiss. But still, the persistent enthusiasm and friendliness of locals continues to be a steady source of light across Calabria.
On what was otherwise a perfect day of pilgrimage, I was disappointed to discover that the other shrine of significance on the itinerary, the Eremo di Sant’Ilarione, was closed off and under repair. This explained, of course, why I had been unable to line up hospitality there, which is a foundational principle of the order now inhabiting the complex. I would later learn that the “order” residing there today, consists of one aging monk, who is almost fully blind.
And yet, I was not forced to go without. On the contrary, I had Suor Rossana and her four sisters waiting for me at the Piccolo Eremo, ready to add their own spark of light to this delightful day of pilgrimage. Well, that and one other thing.
As I walked out of my room, after taking a short rest, I found Suor Rossana in the next room over, fumbling with a device. “It’s for the pipistrelli,” she said. There was an Italian word I hadn’t encountered before. Registering my confusion, she paused, and then she carefully stated, “the bats.” Apparently, they enjoy napping in the tall alcove outside my door. Instead, that small device now emits a periodic, high-pitched chirp, to keep me free from vampirism. You’ve got to watch out for the things that lurk in the dark.
