Monte Oliveto Maggiore: The White Abbey of the Crete Senesi
South of Siena, where the soft Tuscan hills give way to the pale clay badlands of the Crete Senesi, a red-brick abbey rises out of a cypress wood on a crumbling spur of eroded earth. Monte Oliveto Maggiore has been the mother house of the Olivetan Benedictines since the fourteenth century, and the walls of its great cloister carry one of the most celebrated fresco cycles of the Italian Renaissance: the life of Saint Benedict, painted by Luca Signorelli and Il Sodoma. Few monasteries anywhere combine landscape, art and a living monastic tradition so completely, and fewer still do it in a setting this strange and beautiful.
From Sienese palaces to the desert of Accona
In 1313, Giovanni Tolomei, a member of one of Siena's wealthiest merchant families and a respected scholar of law, walked away from his career and his city. With two companions of similar standing, Patrizio Patrizi and Ambrogio Piccolomini, he withdrew to a remote family property known as the desert of Accona, a wilderness of clay ridges and gullies in the hills south of Siena. Taking the religious name Bernardo, he embraced a life of prayer, silence and manual labour among the eroded slopes. What began as a hermit's experiment quickly drew followers. In 1319 Guido Tarlati, the bishop of Arezzo, gave the young community formal recognition and placed it under the Rule of Saint Benedict, and in 1344 the new congregation obtained papal approval. Bernardo's story ended as dramatically as it had begun. When the Black Death reached Tuscany in 1348, he left the relative safety of his hilltop and returned to plague-stricken Siena to care for the sick and dying. He died there of the disease, together with many of his monks, and was canonized by the Church in 2009.
The white monks of Saint Benedict
The community Bernardo founded grew into the Congregation of Saint Mary of Monte Oliveto, whose members are known simply as Olivetans. Unlike the black-robed Benedictines of the older tradition, Olivetan monks wear a white habit, an outward sign of the congregation's particular devotion to the Virgin Mary, to whom all its houses are dedicated. From the start the Olivetans understood themselves as a reform movement within the Benedictine world: a return to austerity, shared poverty and strong central government at a moment when many great abbeys had grown rich and comfortable. Daughter houses multiplied across Tuscany and then throughout Italy, and Olivetan communities can be found today on several continents. Monte Oliveto Maggiore, where the adjective distinguishes the greater mother house from its many offspring, remains the head of the entire congregation and the residence of its abbot general. It also holds the unusual status of a territorial abbey, an ecclesiastical jurisdiction in its own right rather than a monastery folded into a surrounding diocese, a reminder of how much weight this remote hilltop once carried in the life of the Church.
A red-brick citadel among the cypresses
The approach to the abbey is a piece of theatre in itself. Visitors pass first through a fortified medieval gatehouse, a squat brick tower that once controlled access with a drawbridge and still bears glazed terracotta reliefs in the manner of the della Robbia workshops. From there a long avenue shaded by cypresses descends through woodland to the monastery proper, whose warm red brick glows against the grey-white clay of the surrounding ravines. The complex unfolds as a small citadel: the abbey church, several cloisters, a refectory, a chapter house, a library and long ranges of cells, all knitted together over centuries of building. The setting is as precarious as it is picturesque. The abbey stands on soft, unstable ground that erodes into the bare gullies and crested ridges the Tuscans call calanchi, and generations of monks have had to shore up the slopes with retaining walls and careful planting to keep their home from slipping into the valley. That quiet tension between fragility and permanence is part of what makes the place so memorable.
Thirty-six scenes of a saint's life
The artistic heart of Monte Oliveto Maggiore is the Chiostro Grande, the great cloister, whose walls carry a cycle of thirty-six frescoes narrating the life of Saint Benedict as told in the second book of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. Luca Signorelli began the cycle in the late 1490s, painting a group of powerful, sculptural scenes before leaving to take up his famous commission in Orvieto cathedral. From 1505 the work passed to Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, the eccentric painter known as Il Sodoma, who completed the majority of the cycle, including the opening episodes of Benedict's youth, his departure from Norcia and his years as a hermit at Subiaco. The two artists could hardly be more different. Signorelli's scenes are grave and monumental, dominated by weighty figures and stern architecture, while Sodoma fills his walls with courtly youths, portraits, landscapes, exotic animals and sly humour. In one scene Sodoma painted himself gazing out at the viewer, richly dressed, with the pet badgers he famously kept at his side. Walking the four sides of the cloister, following Benedict from wayward student to miracle-working father of Western monasticism, remains one of the great narrative experiences of Renaissance art.
Wood turned into illusion
The abbey church, reshaped in the eighteenth century in a restrained late-baroque manner, guards a treasure older than its present decoration: the choir stalls carved and inlaid by Fra Giovanni da Verona, an Olivetan monk and one of the supreme masters of intarsia, the Italian art of wooden marquetry. Working in the first years of the sixteenth century, he composed panels of astonishing illusionism from countless pieces of naturally coloured wood: musical instruments, songbirds, city views, books and half-open cupboards whose latticed doors seem to swing out of the flat surface. The stalls at Monte Oliveto are counted among the finest examples of the craft anywhere in Italy, and they reward slow, close looking; every seat back is a small trompe-l'oeil world. Fra Giovanni's fame spread well beyond his own congregation, and his surviving work elsewhere, notably in his native Verona, confirms what the choir here makes obvious: in the right hands, inlaid wood could rival painting itself.
A monastery that still works
Monte Oliveto Maggiore is not a museum with monks attached; it is a functioning Benedictine house whose daily rhythm of prayer has continued, with interruptions, for some seven centuries. The community sings the liturgy of the hours, and visitors who time their visit well can hear Gregorian chant rising in the abbey church. The monastery has long been a place of learning as well as prayer. Its historic library preserves manuscripts and early printed books, the old pharmacy recalls the medical care monks once provided for the surrounding countryside, and a workshop on site is dedicated to the restoration of ancient books, continuing the old Benedictine bond between monastic life and the survival of the written word. The monks also work the land, as their rule expects. The abbey's estates produce wine, olive oil and honey, along with herbal preparations in the monastic tradition, and a shop near the entrance sells what the community makes.
Planning a visit through the Crete Senesi
The abbey stands between the small towns of Asciano and Buonconvento, an easy drive south from Siena through some of the most photographed countryside in Italy. The bare clay hills of the Crete Senesi change character with the seasons: green with young wheat in spring, bleached almost lunar in high summer, soft and fog-wrapped in late autumn. The nearby hamlet of Chiusure makes a fine viewpoint over the badlands, and Buonconvento, with its intact medieval walls, pairs naturally with the abbey in a single day out. The church and the great cloister are open to visitors daily, with a pause in the middle of the day, and it is worth remembering that this is a living monastery: services take precedence, silence is appreciated, and modest dress is expected. Come early or late in the day, when the light rakes across the calanchi and the brick of the abbey turns the colour of embers.
Explore on the map
Monte Oliveto Maggiore is one node in a wider web of Benedictine and Olivetan foundations that stretches across Tuscany and far beyond, from the Romanesque abbey of Sant'Antimo near Montalcino to daughter houses on other continents. To see how the mother abbey relates to the monasteries around it, and to plan your own route through the Crete Senesi and the rest of monastic Italy, open the interactive map and start from the pale hills south of Siena.