Le Luciole di La Verna

Luciola--a word we looked up just a few minutes ago--is the Italian word for "firefly." La Verna is the remote mountaintop retreat where, some eight-and-a-half centuries ago, St. Francis of Assisi received the Stigmata--the wounds of Christ--on his palms, feet, and side. It is now a magnificent Franciscan monastery, which we visited last night for the third time (after two visits last year) to hear an organ concert at the Basilica, this time by a British organist named Stephen Cleobury, who played Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, along with Liszt's Variations on an opening chorus from a Bach Cantata ("Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen") and several modern pieces by early 20th century French composers Louis Vierne and Jehan Alain.

But back to the fireflies. On the flagstone road back down the hill after the concert, we stopped to look over the precipice into the deep, dark woods falling away below us, where we saw the gently twinkling lights of thousands of fireflies--luciole, as the Italians more aptly call them, in their delightfully musical tongue. Earlier that evening, after a delicious tagliatelle con tartufi (truffles) in a restaurant in the village below, as we strolled back to our car to drive up the remaining hill to the monastery, the air was suffused with a delicious floral aroma. Both the scent of the fiori and the luciole later that evening left me with a sense of the numinous, as if somehow the gracious spirit of St. Francis were still presiding over this magical mountain.