The first impression you get in walking down the lane that leads to the small chapels on the Sacred Mountain of San Vivaldo is a sense of wonderment and ease. As the road unwinds and the profiles of seventeen little temples begin to emerge from the woods, one feels that in this once-neglected location in central Tuscany, halfway between Certaldo and Volterra, time indeed has stood still: at least, it seems to stand still since one very special traveler, writer Edith Wharton, rediscovered this remarkable “Tuscan shrine” in the 1890s and popularized its story among her American contemporaries in Italian Backgrounds.
According to the local legend reported by the writer, the patron saint of this remote place was a Franciscan tertiary who was born in the nearby town of San Gimignano at the end of the 13th century. Having spent his life as a hermit in a hollow chestnut-tree, soon after his death Vivaldo became the center of much worship among the local population, to the extent that a small sanctuary was built on the spot where his tree had formerly stood.
It was not until the first decades of the 16th century, though, that the monastery of San Vivaldo began to expand and eventually emerged from its obscurity to become the unique location it is nowadays. Thanks to the determination of Fra Tommaso and Fra Cherubino, two Franciscan friars who resolved to let San Vivaldo become a replacement destination for those who could not afford the ever-growing risks of a real pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the location soon became known as the “Jerusalem of Tuscany”. The reason for this nickname lies in these friars’ greatest accomplishment: the planning of about thirty chapels, each adorned with painted terracotta sculptures about the Life of Christ and disposed around the wood as to carefully reproduce the holy sites of the Jerusalem of that time.
But time has stood still in San Vivaldo, as I can personally testify by following in Wharton’s footsteps. The impression gets deeper and deeper when a humble old man approaches me and my companion as we try to get a glimpse of the famous terracottas from the windows of one of the sealed chapels. He is Antonello, the sole custodian of this treasure. As the man opens up the chapel-doors and introduces us to another couple of tourists, we learn that Antonello himself, just like Vivaldo, is a Franciscan tertiary: he takes care of the local monastery along with just two friars, whose names may well be Tommaso and Cherubino. Then, as his daily task provides, the man escorts us with a monk’s calm through the various temples, instructing us on the peculiarity of the place, to begin with the same legend that Wharton may have heard from one of Antonello’s predecessors.
It is a similar sense of “things done in the old tradition” that the people visiting San Vivaldo usually end up with. In fact, as my group climbs up the hill that is meant to reproduce the Golgotha, I realize that we are not only replying Wharton’s itinerary, but even that of the pilgrims who first came here hundreds of years ago to pay homage to the terracottas about the Calvary and Crucifixion on the chapels uphill. Without even noticing, in San Vivaldo one finds himself caught in the middle of a Passion Play. By the simple act of walking from temple to temple, one becomes involved in this place’s centuries-long history.
What is most striking is to know that Wharton actually wrote a part of San Vivaldo’s odd story. Given to her deep knowledge of Italian art, the writer was the one to recognize that the local terracottas were not due to the work of Giovanni Gonnelli, the mysterious “blind sculptor from Gambassi”, but rather they belonged to the school of Giovanni Della Robbia, and were thus much more ancient and important than previously thought.
As our visit comes to an end and the custodian waves goodbye, I cannot help but keep thinking about what Wharton wrote: that the beauty of Italy is not only given by its foreground, but by the details and backgrounds as well. In this respect, the chance to take a day away from Florence and stop by the “Jerusalem” of San Vivaldo is there for anyone to prove it.
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