Stone by stone

WHEN the young St Francis knelt in prayer in the filthy, derelict church of San Damiano in Assisi, around 1206, the wide-eyed figure of Christ on the cross asked him to restore it. When Padre Pietro Lavini, already a Capuchin friar walking in Francis’s footsteps, came for the first time to the ruined church of San Leonardo high in the Apennines, his experience was almost the same. The stones seemed to say: “Why don’t you rebuild us?” Pushed by some mysterious force, he found himself answering: “Why not?”

It seemed impossible. What had been a beacon and a refuge on a busy pilgrim and herding route, along the high valleys of the Tiber and the Tenna between the Adriatic and Rome, was now a jumble of masonry overgrown by brambles. Only one half-fallen Romanesque arch gave a clue to its history. The Benedictines had built a monastery on a nearby mountain, surrendering the little church to another order. But after 40 years of privation those monks, too, had abandoned it. The only standing part had been used for centuries as a sheep pen, and a metre of compacted dung now formed the church floor.