Monte Sant'Angelo and San Giovanni Rotondo
A cave with a church inside it, and the most visited sanctuary in Italy.
The Gargano has been a holy mountain for fifteen hundred years. At the end of the fifth century, by tradition, the archangel Michael appeared three times above a cave on the mountain and declared it consecrated by himself: the cave became a church without being altered, and it is the only Catholic sanctuary never consecrated by human hands.
Monte Sant'Angelo stands at eight hundred metres and looks over the gulf of Manfredonia. The sanctuary is reached by a stairway of eighty-six steps that descends below street level: at the bottom is the bronze door of 1076, made in Constantinople, and behind it the cave. Since 2011 the complex has been a Unesco site, one of the seven places of Lombard power in Italy.
The town
Above the sanctuary lies the Junno quarter, a district of single storey white houses, all alike, built in the seventeenth century for pilgrims and labourers: the streets are narrow and steep and are walked in half an hour. There is also the Norman Swabian Aragonese castle, and from every corner the sea is visible three hundred metres below.
San Giovanni Rotondo
Twenty kilometres away, on the other side, San Giovanni Rotondo is the town of Padre Pio, who lived there from 1916 to 1968: it is one of the most visited sanctuaries in the world, with millions of pilgrims a year. The new church, designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2004, has a roof of stone arches and seats six thousand people.
From Vieste it is an hour to Monte Sant'Angelo and an hour and a half to San Giovanni Rotondo: they are done together in one day, on the road that crosses the plateau. In summer the car parks of both sanctuaries fill early, and it is worth leaving in good time.