The Hermitage and Monastery of the Holy Savior 

 

 

 

As has been mentioned, Tuscany, a name derived from the Etruscan civilization which preceded the Roman civilization in this part of Italy, is the land of the foundation of the Augustinian Friars. It was here in the environs of Siena, Pisa and Lucca that numerous eremitical communities, some following the Rule of St. Augustine and others not, were brought together to form this mendicant order, much like the Franciscan and Dominican Orders who predated the Augustinians by some twenty or so years. It is here in Tuscany that the oldest tradition lies and the Roots of the Augustinians are found.

Lecceto is a name that has received a great deal of notoriety in the Order in the past twenty-five years or so because of the attention it has been given by historians of the Order and due to the rebirth it has experienced with the coming of a community of Augustinian contemplative and cloistered nuns from Siena. Lecceto has also been the site of two Augustinian International Youth encounters celebrated in 1987 and 1989.

It was considered to be a particularly holy place of the Order and a center of Augustinian spirituality for over six hundred years. There is some evidente of an eremitical settlement long before the union of 1244. However, the first written witness comes from the year 1223. At that time, the area was called 'Lake Woods' (Selva di Lago because of the forest around it and its location near Lake Verano. The hermitage was not Augustinian at the beginning, but when the community took part in them Little Union of 1244, they then assumed the Rule of St. Augustine and began a long history of Augustinian religious life.

In time, the name changed too and became 'Lecceto' because of all the ilex trees (lecce), a class of oak, that surround the monastery. Like CentumcelIe, Lecceto eventually also made claim to a much earlier Augustinian presence. In the first cloister, there is a marble slab that attests to the visit that Augustine made when he stayed at Lecceto for a while in the year 400, an impossibility because by then, he was already a bishop in Africa and never left that continent thereafter.

However, the legend began in an effort to prove the continuity they had with Augustine's North African monastic life by means of his companions who fled the invasion of the Vandals soon after his death. It was asserted that they came to Italy and proceeded to found monastic settlements here in Tuscany where they lived independently until the Church brought them all together in the thirteenth century. They desperately desired to name Augustine as the true Founder of the newly established Augustinian Order. However, the greatness of Lecceto came later when it became a place of intense contemplation within the Order. There are some stories (and legends) of friars of extraordinary sanctity, some of them amusing for their simplicity and quaintness, others well documented and still inspiring.

In the sacristy of the Church, there is a painting of the famous 'Blessed of Lecceto' designed much like a family tree, depicting friars who achieved notoriety for their holiness even though they were never formally beatified. In the inner cloister, there are frescoes on the walls depicting some of the legends, including the life of those special friars who spent long periods of prayer in the caves a little beyond the boundaries or the monastery.

A few of the caves afe stili there. It is a fact that friars from different parts of Europe sought out Lecceto in order to live a contemplative life. We know of members of the community who had come from different parts of Italy as well as from France and England. The most famous was William Flete, an Englishman from Cambridge University at the time of Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. In the year 1359, when he was about to attain his Master of theology degree at Cambridge University in England, Flete had a change of heart about how he was to live as an Augustinian. He chose to leave England and come to Lecceto to give himself to prayer. He stayed for the remainder of his life. He became a master of the spiritual life, a guide to many persons and a personal confidant of St. Catherine of Siena. It was at Lecceto that the Observant Movement within the Augustinian Order was born. The Observant Movement was a way of returning to a more faithful following of the Rule of St. Augustine and the Constitutions of the Order at a time when a certain amount of confusion and compromise with the religious lire had set in. From the Observant Congregation of Lecceto, similar other groups began in other parts of the world, including Germany where Martin Luther, a few centuries later made his profession of vows within the Observant Congregation of Saxony. In its heyday, Lecceto gave to the Order four of its most distinguished Prior Generals. Difficult times came at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In 1782, the Grand Duke of Tuscany suppressed the entire Congregation of Lecceto, and in 1808, the government of Napoleon closed the cornrnunity itself. Two years later, the sixteen friars left the rnonastery for other parts of the Order.

From then on, the building fell into ruin, victim of vandalism and neglett. In 1968, the roof had fallen in; the wood had rotted; the insides were burned in several places; chickens and pigs occupied the ground floor; birds had nests. In a word, the place had turnbled down. At about this time, the bishop of Siena, a Dominican friar, decided that he wanted to bring the Augustinian spirituality of Lecceto back to the local church of Siena. He began a project to restore it to its former grandeur and to invite the Augustinian contemplative nuns of the city of Siena to transfer their community there. They arrived in 1972 when the restoration work was only partially completed. They put themselves to prayer and hard work; the beginnings were very trying. Yet, progress began. Soon, Lecceto was visited by a few persons who sought quiet and solitude in the mist of their busy lives. They were welcome by the nuns who lived and continue to live the charism of hospitality of the Augustinian way of life. Little by little, Lecceto began to be known throughout Italy and beyond. In 1978, the first new vocation to this contemplative way of life arrived; a year later, another came. Since then the community has grown notably and the spiritual influence of this community has spread beyond Lecceto. The woods, the walls, the cloister, the towers and the history of Lecceto make it a place of prayer. But it is the community of Augustinian nuns that make it an authentic place of contemplation.

The present community of Augustinian cloistered, contemplative nuns is a living testimony of this aspect of the Augustinian way of life. Currently, there are some twenty-five relatively young women - medical doctors, former professors, many with university terminal degrees - who make up this community. Without interfering with their cloistered life, they open their monastery and its contemplative surroundings to people from all walks of life who come for a time of retreat, prayer and reflection. Overnight guests are welcome and often join the nuns at their various times of chanting the Liturgy of the Hours in the church. Notable parts of Lecceto to remember after a visit are: the two cloisters, the inner one from the fourteenth century with its 'well of St. Catherine of Siena' where it is said she used to rest after walking here from the nearby city, the defense tower that overlooks the whole complex, the frescoes of the life of Lecceto, the refectory, the church, originally gothic and later made baroque, the monastery garden with its chapel of Blessed Giovanni, the trees, and most of all, the silence.