Subiaco

On Thursday we went to Subicao for a day's reflection. This is the area to which St Benedict fled as a young man and lived as a hermit in a cave for three years. It is a beautiful area, heavily wooded with steep mountainsides. The monastery built around his cave is literally built onto the cliff face. The weather was glorious this year and as we went up the path, through the trees, the singing birds, the gentle breezes, we thought we were in for a quiet day......

Alas, maintanence even needs to be done in 'heaven on earth'. These men had abseiled down the cliff and were jackhammering into the rock face ini order to shore up the foundations. They must have been enormously strong and with no fear of heights. You don't want to know what wasn't below them. The jackahmmered for 3&1/2 hours, Most of us went off and found a quiet place nearby. They did stop for siesta so some of us had a few hours quiet in the monastery around the cave. Then we went down the hill.

At the lower monastery we had a look at the 'book' display. Subiaco had the first printing press in Italy. As well as that they had an extraordinary number of ancient books and manuscripts. Their oldest piece is about second century. An eldery monk could see were interested and he bought out this 10C copy of the Rule of Benedict that came from France. Underneath in that glass case are sheets from the first printed book in Italy. Converstaion with him was difficult as we had no common language but we found a way. A Ugandan sister who we had brought with us, knew French as did he. So we conversed through her. But it does say something about the education systems of Aust and the US that we, the highly educated group had no-one who could speak either Italian or French.

In this display area was an old olice press. This is huge!

We then had a tour through the lower monastery and came home through a great storm. It seems that that day the Abruzzi region had another earthquake. L'Aquila used to 'belong' to the monastery of Subiaco and is quite close. But we didn't feel a thing, maybe the jackhammering men set it off.

As we go down into places like that I can't help thinking how vulnerable we would be in an earthquake.

The other day I had an incident with a thief. We were getting on the train at Termini - our Citivecchia line - all tired out. Two fellows were handing out pieces of paper and distrating most of the group. As I got on, a third fellow put his hand down into my lunch bag. Mechtild from Jamberoo saw it and without thinking jumped over and smacked his hand out and then took a assertive pose from her youth group leader days and the fellow jumped back very quickly with both arms up showing he had gotten nothing. Still the three fellows hung around. When I made a quip that had all of us laugh they went off. Seems laughing at them hurt their pride but it did not stop them. A few minutes later we saw one of them running quickly away from the carriage further up. You cannot be too careful of thieves here in Rome. This was our second incident this year.

Today I'm going off to Orvietto for just over 2 days. At this time we encourage the group to visit some other part of Italy to get that experience. And Marcia and I are going for a rest. There is a magnificnet church there...and St Patrick's well - a place built to the people would have a water supply in time of siege but Marcia well knows that I'm not accompaning her down the 450 steps to the bottom to see where they collected water.