Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore

In the year 1319 «from the Nativity of the incarnate Word, the aforementioned men, beloved of God, went to this place, with their tools and their books, to offer God a devoted service». Thus the monk Antonio da Barga, in his Chronicle of 1450, describes the birth of Monte Oliveto Maggiore. Giovanni Tolomei (later Saint Bernard), together with Patrizio Patrizi and Ambrogio Piccolomini, retired to the desert of Acona to live according to the Rule of Saint Benedict. With the charta fundationis of 1319, the place became an abbey, giving rise to a new monastic family, approved in 1344. Today visitors can tour the church with its wooden choir, the refectory, the cloister, the library, the pharmacy, the chapter house, the wine cellar, and the herbalist's shop. The community has lived here for over seven hundred years: about thirty monks still continue a life of prayer and work today, renewing the Benedictine tradition daily.