ITALY: Succisa Virescit

In the fertile valley of the Rapido, below Monte Cassino, the seed buried in the spring had germinated and borne fruit. Columns of two-wheeled donkey carts, piled high with long sheaves of grain, wound slowly along the dusty roads to the marketplaces. High above, on a barren hill, the ruins of one of Christendom’s most famous and ancient abbeys gleamed chalk white in the sun.

There, too, it was a kind of harvest time: the 35 Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino were rebuilding the Abbey stone by stone, with their hands. One of them, round little Dom Oderisco Graziosi, looked about him. “It takes an olive tree 30 years to bear fruit . . . For us it will be decades, perhaps centuries. But that day will come . . .”

For more than three months, until General Wladyslaw Anders’ Poles finally took it on May 18, 1944, Monte Cassino had been a highly effective German army outpost, battered by Allied shells and bombs. Almost as soon as the Germans were driven out, the monks began building again. They heard reports of great collections being taken up in the U.S.,* but to date have received only occasional Italian funds. Meanwhile, the monks live in the undestroyed 10% of their Abbey while they try to rebuild the rest.

Very Slowly. Few, if any, of them will live to see the final restoration. Gaunt, 60year-old Dom Francesco Vignanelli, who once taught architecture in the Abbey’s seminary, will be lucky to see the end of his own special task. From dawn to nightfall he sits in a shack, cataloguing and patching together the fragments of Monte Cassino’s treasures: arms and heads of statues, chunks of carved wood, tiny bits of mosaic. “It goes very slowly,” he said. “Still, we’ve rebuilt six statues.”

Uncatalogued in the subterranean passages beneath the Abbey is a curious collection of debris: leather-bound ledgers recording 700 years of the Abbey’s life; stuffed birds and animals from its zoological collection; the molten pipes of its great 17th Century organ, contorted into weird sausage shapes; rusting German machine guns with ammunition belts still attached. On the dark walls are crude sketches of female figures traced by homesick German soldiers, and a Rhenish landscape with the caption Oh, du wun-derschöner Deutscher Rhein (Oh, you beautiful German Rhine).

“Look About You.” Monte Cassino’s abbot, white-haired Ildefonso Rea, last week recalled that the Abbey’s motto is succisa virescit (cut down, it grows again). He said quietly: “This monastery was founded in the 6th Century. Four times* it has been destroyed, and every time, no matter how long it took, Monte Cassino has risen again. Nature shows us the urgent will to live. Look about you. Half-burned tree trunks are sprouting fresh and vigorous shoots.”

Earlier in the year, when the birds were nesting, the monks discovered a nest of swallows above the altar in the newly patched crypt of Saint Benedict. Some of them proposed to tear it down. But Dom Oderisco Graziosi good-humoredly intervened. “Let them stay,” he urged. “After all, they too are rebuilding.”

* In 1947 Dom Mauro Inguanez, Abbey librarian and archivist, visited the U.S. to start a fund-raising organization. He fell ill and his plans have not yet been carried out. *By the Lombards in 580; by the Saracens in 884; by earthquake in 1349; and by the French in 1799.