A Step Away from Heaven
"Mountains serve as silent teachers, shaping quiet students," penned Goethe. These unforgiving instructors summon within those who listen the enchantment and trials of stillness.
Ancient grounds where earth embraces sky, where vertical ascent merges with the weight and substance of stone. These are cathedrals built from rock and remembrance, where earthly transience reaches upward toward the celestial. The Chiavano Plateau stands as that stone bridge maintaining the connection between ground and atmosphere, a stage within an ancient amphitheater whose terraced seats vanish into quilted clouds. A span thrown between yesterday and tomorrow, suspended in time while nature renews itself daily.
It's as though an artist's brush lingered over this section of Valnerina, tracing the outline of villages and countryside where humanity has carefully inserted itself. Yet nature never submits meekly to human intervention: modest plots carved from mountainsides, improvised pastures, and rough paths that fade into the plateau's core all remind observers that here, Nature manifests according to Leopardi's dual vision: both nurturing mother and harsh stepmother, twin faces of a single coin.
Shaped by human toil until it assumes an almost human profile, the countryside appears composed, nearly dormant, within a whirlwind of pastel hues and shadow play, its chromatic progression resembling the humanized landscapes of ancient Scotland more than typical Umbrian hill country.
In this era of devastating cultural identity loss, the Chiavano Plateau jealously guards dusty traces of living popular tradition, resisting stoically the disappearance of its most ancient guardians. This folk culture serves as a summary of many lives, mysteriously penetrating the meaning of things, even those seemingly mundane.
Near a crossroads of the ancient Roman road system stands Coronella, a locality deriving its name from the Latin "Colonnella," referring to a marble column Romans used as a reference point when constructing roadways. A ghost village that appears and vanishes behind trees grown in abandoned gardens, this settlement lives only on August 15th, when church shutters reopen for a celebration as simple as it is heartfelt. The mystery of faith revives in spontaneous processions, in sacred shrines marking the shepherd's mountain path and flock, in those climbs that become, above all, life experiences.
Against the scenic backdrop of these peaks, the shadows of empty, silent settlements project themselves orderly and composed, defenseless against time's inexorable passage. Yet this very silence opens space for introspection—a silence empty of words but not of emotions and memories. Silences exist in infinite variety, and grasping their distinctions proves no simple task. Some are atrocious: silences of death and chilling solitude. Others are desired, long-awaited, or surprisingly unexpected. Eloquent silences where even the principle of non-contradiction dissolves. Silences where fear and courage converge, tears and smiles, questions and answers—coincidentia oppositorum.
Observing from these stone altars a landscape seemingly changing in appearance yet remaining identical in its most intimate aspect allows for precisely those unexpected silences that surprise through the tumult with which they manifest. Tempestuous peaks, but for what they evoke in those who scrutinize them. The best attitude becomes one of attention, of pausing to contemplate. One isn't always immediately capable of comprehending the message hidden behind nature's silence.
Ancient, almost ominous figures inhabit this quiet plateau. Gnarled hands and faces carved by sweat—a bitter sweat finding its purpose in the land's generous fruits. People accustomed to the laborious mountain life, rejecting the facile idols of so-called progress. Within those gnarled hands lies the deepest meaning of this morbid attachment to earth, this strong devotion to toil and work that, while ennobling, renders humans beast-like. Yet among farmers and nature, an almost mystical relationship seems to exist, capable of breaking the bond with the sacred and mixing with the profane until flowing as a single watercourse into the vast ocean of popular tradition.
A complex territory that not even its most ancient inhabitant knows deeply—a cauldron of traditions, culture, and stories whose origins seem lost in time's darkness.
This is a land exuding folk wisdom, where phantoms and memories of a distant but never forgotten past overlap. A glorious past with roots in ancient Rome's splendor, in the countryside surrounding tiny Villa San Silvestro, a village of barely 20 souls made famous by a Roman temple probably dedicated to Hercules. And it's worth saying: with almost Herculean force, this site still resists the cold winter winds that blow here. The genesis of the hero to whom the temple is dedicated—the result of carnal union between earthly Alcmene and Jupiter—seems to further strengthen the relationship between this land and sky, between matter and celestial, between what is human and divine.
Precisely on the Roman temple's podium stands the village church, at the point where, in a not-too-distant past, votive choirs rose toward the Roman pantheon's divinities, in a place suffused with faith and common fear of the divine.
Yet this is a land steeped in history, anecdotes, and figures passed into annals for their valor but too often forgotten. Speaking of illustrious figures, the name Nicola Zabaglia thunders—pontifical architect from Buda whose fame rests on the celebrated phrase "water to the hemp," with which he managed to erect the scaffolding for realizing St. Peter's Cupola, a wonder of humanity.
Closing one's eyes while climbing the steep ascent to Chiavano, it almost seems musicians' trumpets still ring within the walls of the ancient Clavano family castle—from whom the plateau takes its name, and whose passage leaves only the ancient tower—announcing Abrunamonte's arrival, distinguished for ardor and courage in intercommunal struggles during the early fourteenth century's first decade.
And it's from Chiavano that our journey begins, from the terrace dominating this wild land whose children, in both great deeds and daily ones, have succeeded in expressing valor and ardor in some cases almost heroic—that only those dwelling a step from heaven can display in the harshest battles, in those superhuman silences that make noise.