IT MAY seem eccentric to write about Montesanto. For the place as I first knew it is beyond recall. High on a gently sloping ridge above the valley of the Vigi, south-east of Casenove on the ancient road from Foligno across the Apennines, Montesanto was an outpost of the duchy of Spoleto. The crumbled medieval walls enclose a rectangular area originally laid out on a grid plan. The Touring Club Ital-iano’s guide devoted four lines to Montesanto. I heard of it though Marilena Ranieri, whose mother, Signora dei Vecchi, remembered that her family, the Orfini, migrated every summer from Foligno to what her friend Berenson described as their robber-baron’s castle at Casenove, and then, when the heat became impossible, withdrew to Montesanto, which at 753 metres above sea level was always cooler. In extreme old age she asked to be taken back, and was surprised that what had been a day’s journey took half an hour. But it was not for that reason that Marilena made me want to go.
Largely abandoned as Montesanto then was, for most of its inhabitants had long since left, there was still at the central crossing a cluster of two or three houses of some consequence. Near these was the parish church. This retained the original late Renaissance and baroque furnishings, an earlier triptych and a number of altarpieces. The finest was a then little-known Nativity by Beccafumi, the tender subtlety of which, both in design and colour, was only the more poignant in so remote a setting. Inevitably the panel seems a little less eloquent now that it is in quarantine at the museum in Spoleto. But at least it is safe. Montesanto is not, for it was not far from the epicentre of the devastating earthquake of 1996. The few houses were shattered and the front of the church fell away. I returned a few months afterwards, on a sharp winter’s day, and wept.
The Beccafumi will probably never return. And the ancient walls will continue to crumble. But there is still much for the patient visitor to see in the area. Just south of Casenove, at Serrone, is one of the most touching northern Caravaggesque pictures in Italy, the Holy Family in the Carpenter’s Shop. Some miles south of Montesanto the Vigi flows into the Nera. The economic importance of the valley of the Nera as a route through the Apennines is shown by the fortifications at Borgo Cerreto and such local churches as the Romanesque San Felice di Narco.