Monte Sant’Angelo and the pilgrim road

Monte Sant’Angelo sits on the southern rim of the Gargano at eight hundred metres, with the whole Gulf of Manfredonia laid out below it and, on a clear day, the plain of the Tavoliere running away to the mountains of the mainland. The town is old and white and steep. But the reason it exists is underground: a cave in the rock beneath the main street where, at the end of the fifth century, the Archangel Michael is said to have appeared, and where people have been coming to see the place ever since.

Fifteen hundred years of pilgrims is a long time. The cave has been visited by Lombard kings and Norman knights, by popes and emperors, by Francis of Assisi and by more ordinary people than anyone could count, and it is still, on any morning, full of them. This guide is about the cave, the town around it, and the road up.

The oldest shrine to Michael in the west

The story is that in the year 490 a bull belonging to a rich man of Siponto wandered off and was found kneeling at the mouth of a cave on the mountain. When the man shot an arrow at it, the arrow turned round in the air and struck him instead. The bishop of Siponto, asked to make sense of this, fasted and prayed and was visited by the archangel, who told him the cave was under his protection and needed no consecration, since he had consecrated it himself. Two further appearances followed, one of them in the middle of a battle. A church was built at the cave mouth, and the mountain became Michael’s.

What happened next made it more than a local shrine. When the Lombards conquered southern Italy in the seventh century they adopted Michael, the warrior angel, as their own, and made his cave on the Gargano their national sanctuary. Pilgrim roads were built from Rome and Benevento. Knights came to pray before going to war. The shrine on Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy was founded, according to its own legend, after a vision instructing its bishop to copy this one. And in the early eleventh century a group of Norman pilgrims here were recruited to fight in a local war, which is one of the stories of how the Normans came to rule the south. The cave has been on the map of Europe for as long as there has been one.

Going down

You enter from the street through a gateway beside an octagonal bell tower, built in the 1270s and looking, with its eight sides, faintly like Castel del Monte’s little cousin. Beyond it a flight of steps descends into the hill. On the walls, pilgrims have carved their names and crosses for centuries, and some of the inscriptions are in runes.

At the bottom, a pair of bronze doors cast in Constantinople in 1076 open into the cave. They are covered in panels showing angels, and they are among the finest things of their kind that survive. Beyond them, the church is the cave itself: a rough vault of rock, damp and cool, with an altar at the far end and a white marble statue of the archangel, sword raised, made in the early sixteenth century by Andrea Sansovino. Water drips somewhere. People kneel. It is not a place of beauty in the usual sense. It is a place where you feel, unmistakably, that something has been going on for a very long time.

Stay a while. Then climb back up into the light.

The Junno

Below the sanctuary the town falls down the hillside in a quarter called the Junno, which is the most photographed thing on the Gargano and deserves to be. The houses are white, one room deep, stacked in terraces down the slope, each with its own steep stair and each with a tall narrow chimney so that the roofline is a forest of them. The lanes between are stepped and whitewashed and turn every few metres. Nobody planned it. It grew, as pilgrim towns do, out of the need to house people cheaply on a steep hill, and it has been kept because the people who live in it like it.

Walk down through it in the morning light and back up in the afternoon. Bread and cheese are sold from doorways. The views from the lower lanes, out over the gulf, are the ones the town is remembered by.

The castle and the view

At the top of the town the castle sits on the highest ground, built by the Normans, enlarged by Frederick II and finished by the Aragonese, which is the standard history of every castle in Puglia and no less true here. Inside there is not a great deal. Outside, from the walls, there is the whole southern Gargano: the gulf, the coast curving away towards Bari, the salt pans white in the distance, the Tavoliere plain, and on the clearest days the volcano of Monte Vulture across the border. It is the best view in the region and it is free.

Near the castle, on a small square, is the building the town calls the Tomb of Rotari. It is not a tomb and Rotari, a Lombard king, is not in it. It is a twelfth-century baptistery, tall and round inside, with carved capitals worth looking at closely and a name that nobody has managed to change. Beside it is the Romanesque portal of Santa Maria Maggiore, another good reason to stop.

The pilgrim road from Siponto

The old way to the sanctuary came from the sea. Siponto was the Roman port on the gulf below, and the road pilgrims took ran from its cathedral up the mountain. Siponto itself was abandoned in the thirteenth century, drowned in malaria, and King Manfred founded Manfredonia a few kilometres along the coast to replace it. What is left is the church: Santa Maria di Siponto, a square Romanesque building of the eleventh century, standing alone in a field.

Beside it, since 2016, stands something else. The foundations of the early Christian basilica that once adjoined the church have been rebuilt in the air, full size, in wire mesh, by the artist Edoardo Tresoldi. It is a drawing of a church, transparent, with the sky showing through, and at dusk when it is lit it is one of the most affecting modern works in southern Italy. Come here first, in the morning, and look up at the mountain. Then drive the road the pilgrims walked.

Padre Pio, next door

Twenty-five kilometres west, on the other side of the mountain, is San Giovanni Rotondo, where Padre Pio lived for fifty years and died in 1968, and which now receives millions of pilgrims a year. Renzo Piano built a vast new church for them in 2004, a fan of stone arches under a low roof, and the town around it is a modern industry of hotels and shops. It is the opposite of the cave in every way: bright, enormous, recent and full. Go if you want to understand what pilgrimage looks like now, and how little the idea has changed even as everything around it has.

What to eat at eight hundred metres

The town’s sweet is unlike anything else in Puglia: two round communion wafers pressed together around a filling of almonds caramelised in honey, sold in every bar and bakery in stacks. It is called an ostia ripiena, a filled host, and it tastes of the mountain. Beyond that, this is highland food. Pancotto, a soup of bread and wild greens. Caciocavallo from the cows that graze the forest pastures, cut into slabs and grilled. Lamb. Wild boar in season. And bread, from the ovens in the Junno, that is nearly as good as Altamura’s and will fight you about it.

Then, if the afternoon is yours, take the road north out of the town into the beech forest, and let the Gargano show you its other face.