Most medieval towns are built on the highest mountains in the area, easily supplied, fortified, and protected. Spoleto on the other hand is built on a hill in a small valley where water was brought in by means of a massive aqua duct.
I was told by Rodney J Lojak, Professor of English and Medieval Literature at the University of Perugia that Spoleto’s location might have to do with the fact that the largest mountain in the area is MonteLuco, a mystical and spiritual place protected and preserved by even the earliest inhabitants of Umbria, thousands of years ago.
He posited the question, why when most of the peninsula was uninhabited would people come from thousands of miles a way and travel inland so far? Perhaps there was something important, something special or mystical about this area of Umbria.
What power does it hold?
During the middle ages, not too far from MonteLuco in the town of Assisi, a young man, the son of a wealthy merchant owner was experiencing a religious and spiritual conversion that would lead him first from a life of ease, to a life of ridicule, when he gave ”everything that he had” back to his father and wandered mostly naked through the streets of Assisi, and finally to a life of revered mystic, known throughout the world as St Francis of Assisi.
As John Michael Talbot has written, “Francis turned his back on the worldly wealth to embrace the simple virtues: Solitude, Humility, Creativity, Community, Compassion and Service.”
On Monteluco is a famous forest called Il Bosco Sacro or the Sacred Woods. Not too far from it’s entrance stands a stone, a replica of an original stone now placed in the Civic Museum in Spoleto, that states if anyone knowingly takes anything from the forest or cuts down a tree “they must pay atonement to the God Jupiter with an ox and 300 donkeys will be the fine.”
Although not much is know about St Francis’ time on Monteluco it is where St Francis chose to go after his religious conversion. It is in the Sacred Woods of Monteuco where he started his Franciscan Brotherhood, now the largest religious order in the world.
