The tower of David, the Amiata's prophet
The Mount Labbro, in the south of Tuscany. A site permanently windblown. A bare elevation on which only the shrubs of juniper and the thorn-bush takes root among the heaps of stones. In the middle of nowhere, while the wiew is rowing towards the infinity. towards the dark and imposing mass of Mount Amiata or the undulation or Maremma with hersecrets, the Etruscan necropolis and the disappeared towns.
The wind, on the top of Mount Labbro, never stops lashing against your face, insinuates itself under your clothes, messes up your hair, as if it feel the necessity to narrate you stories by now swallowed up by the time. Really an unique site,rather a long away from every inhabitated place and accessible only by an uncomfortable country road. A site that even unquiets. A feeling that increases as we are climbing the mount towards the summit. While the stone heaps, before placed disorderly by the nature, collect to form ruins of ancient buildings. Near, a little iron cross with undeciphrable symbols. And behind a cave that penetrates in the heart of the mountain to form a little room in which the only presence is an altar, an on it candles lighted you did not know by whom.
And over, on the top of all, a stone tower that you are not able to define and catalogue. The only thing you can do is to call to your mind the Sardinia's nuraghi, the Mesopotamia's ziggurat, the troglodytic constructions of remote and with no name lands. But why there, in this remote and lonely place of Tuscany? Not even if a spiteful god had placed it with the intention to make vacillating all our certainties.
However al this is absolutely real. You can touch it, you can get easily on it, thanks to a stair that turns around the building. On the top only a cross, a poor, essential cross. From here, the look gets lost towards an indefinite and long far away horizon. But the thing that in particular strikes is the silence. A silence that rarely you can find elsewhere. The only noise you perceive is the blowing of the wind, incessant and continuous., a wind that up here is, as you know, the breath of God.
Probably, these were the same impression of David Lazzaretti, when he decided to go exactly on the top of this mount to found there a new Sion capable of finally reconciling the lost humanity with his Creator. He was a profet, a visionary, a revolutionary, a defensor of the poor and exploited masses against the arrogance of the rich land-owners and of the mighty ones? But above all he was the bearer of a dream of justice and of an hope in a better and fairer world. A dream that broke against the carabineers' rifles, in the tragic 18th August, 1878.
Nevertheless, still today, all here tells about him. And the strange stone tower, that you can see from a long far away, is known simply as the "tower of David".
David Lazzaretti was born in Arcidosso in 1834. Son of a carter, he will be compelled to do the same job himself. Arcidosso, as the other villages situated on the wooded slopes fon Mount Amiata, was inhabitated especially by poor farmers and highlanders that lived by a very difficult agricolture and by the little the chestnut wood was be able to supply them. An effort that let them to survive only few months a year and obliged them to go abroad to do seasonal jobs to maintains their's families.
Perhaps owing to the long lonely journeys necessaries for his job, or owing to his melancholic disposition. The fact is that he, the poor David that learnt to read and to write thanks to the parish priest of the village, develops a strong disposition to meditation. During one of his journeys, he had a vision in which a friar predict him that his life will be a mistery. It is only the beginning of a itinerary signed by other visions, requests of conversations with the pope, moral falls. Since when, in 1868, he retired into a cave near Montorio Romano.
After that experience, Lazzaretti come back to his Arcidosso completely transfomed, by now with the attitude and the charisma of a biblical prophet. Disgusted by the exploitation of his figure, he decided to move to the isolated slopes of Mount Labbro. Here he built a tower that, in his intention, would have become the first building of he new Sion, the axis, the centre of a new world. Only a little below the tower, an hermitage and a chapel were constructed.
A site that begins to draw the poor farmers and highlanders of the neighbourhood that find in David's message an instrument of redemption not only spiritual. Those are the years in which the unity of Italy was realized, a unit strongly wanted by the bourgeois and the freemason, but for the great part of the Italians it meant only more poverty.
The reach land-owners and a part of the clergy, that in a first time had taken a liking to David Lazzaretti, afterwards turned their's back to him when they realized that the movement begun by him was becaming an authentic social movement that professes, as on a christian point of view, the community of goods and the fraternity. For this reason, he is arrested several times and condemned by the Holy Office.
In the fatidical 18th August 1878, David, came down from the Mount Labbro at the head of an imposing procession of men, women and children to the purpose to ratify his role as manifestation of Christ. Together with a joubilant multitude, he found the carabineers, sent by the vigilant Italian state, that opened fire at his defenceless companions, gravely wounding Lazzaretti who will die after a long agony in the evening, and killing other three people. His followers were imprisonned and processed. But, in spite of the persecution,the movement, with his rites and symbols, still exist. And every year, on August 18th, the members of the movement called giurisdavidico, climb up the slopes of Mount Labbro until the David's tower wathing and praying all night.
In Arcidosso there is a
But here, in the bare solitudes of Mount Labbro, the time time seems to have stood still. I have heard, from inhabitants of this sites, that here should send forth a sort of energy, that you can distinctly perceive, Personally, all the times I came back here, I have never perceived nothing like that, and I do not believe in those things. But, every time I am walking towards the David's tower, I always feel an emotion that renews again. Maybe it depends on the solitude of this site, or on the beauty and the incredible vastness of the landscape. Maybe it depends on the deep solidarity that I feel to have with David Lazzaretti, a person, as me, aimed at great goals, but defeated by the poor vicissitudes of life and of human beings. Or, simply, because I have never feel so close to me the Gos's breathing, hearing it in the wind whispering, in the evening, the last caress from the agonizing sun.
Mount Labbro (1193 metres of altitude) is an isolated relief that you can reach, by a dirt road, from Roccalbegna, Santa Fiora and Arcidosso, all villages situated in the province of Grosseto. After parking your car, you have to cover the last climbing way (about 15 minutes) only by foot.
Written by Claudio Aita ©
