In 2004, Francesco Patriarca stayed on several occasions in the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore where he took part in the monks’ daily lives. He entitled this series of photographs The Accona Desert, after the inhospitable and barren land where the Benedictine monks came to settle at the height of the Middle Ages.

A winding road which clings onto the yellow and white hills, cracked in parts like an old elephant’s skin, leads to the Monte Oliveto Maggiore monastery. There, in the middle of this desolate landscape, the white building’s solitary and majestic silhouette stands out, planted like an oasis in the middle of a desert.

During the 11th century, monks were venerated and it is around this date that Beato Bernardo, who came from the rich Sienese family of the Tolomei, gave up luxury and riches to devote himself to a life of poverty and solitude in the shelter of the caves of the Accona Desert. Throughout the whole of Europe, under the influence of the crusades, many men like him, hermits or monks, left behind a corrupted world. They went in search of deserted places where they could dedicate their life wholly to God, where they could hear His call, just as the prophets had done previously as they heard the divine speech in the Judea desert. It was only later, in 1319, that the congregation of Olivetan monks was founded, only two paces away from the cave where the saint had lived.

Who are these men, these heroes of the faith, who committed themselves to the monastic way? Men precisely like Saint Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order to which the Olivetan monks belong, spurred by a longing for the absolute and who had at heart, as Gregorio Magno his biographer tells us, “only to please God”. A faultless man, his intransigence would not waver until unity was restored and the ravage of the opposing forces of good and evil would cease. The monastic way of life is not synonymous with peace, as one might be inclined to think, but rather a battleground. These men are therefore the warriors of the Lord, ready for anything to win the struggle against Satan, whose outcome might save the world. “Whatever their circumstances,” writes Umberto Eco, “Moralists and aesthetes are not individuals who are insensitive to earthly pleasures: on the contrary they feel, with a greater intensity than others, those types of solicitations. It is therefore in the conflict between the reaction to earthly matters and tension directed towards the supernatural that the drama of the aesthetic field takes place.”¹

Seen in this way, the desert, as it had been for Christ confronting Satan, is the ideal setting for the sacred drama where the struggle between God and devil can take place. And this is what you can feel today, even if you live far from religious preoccupations, in this monastery perched in the middle of nowhere, this dense and implacable presence of the devil, simultaneously invited to the battleground and beaten, incessantly referred to by the priest serving mass, even though the visitor in this place built to the glory of God thinks that he might be safe from temptation. The struggle takes place first and foremost in each individual, and this is why monks taking up the vows create a rupture and a separation. The hood or cowl, with which the monks cover their heads, symbolises the highest, celestial sphere. Covering your head means more than just becoming invisible, disappearing and dying. When the monks disappear under their hoods, they are reaffirming their death in the face of the world. In the middle of the landscape, they appear like a subtraction, the missing piece from a jigsaw puzzle. Draped so, they prepare themselves to confront this constant struggle with evil, until they have obliterated it from within themselves.

I wonder what pushes man even today to choose such a radical retreat and to adopt the monastic way? Even at the end of the 12th century, lay society turned away from monastic orders as they waited for churchmen to stop retreating to secluded places. “The monastic institution,” writes G. Duby, “already belonged to the past, to the rural past, as did the whole tradition of condemning earthly interests.”²

Must one understand this choice as essential to the man in search of spirituality, as monastic life has survived amidst many other forms which incarnate this necessity?

Since the 1970s, many American artists have created monumental works amid deserts. In Los Angeles, you frequently see men and women going off to meditate and to commune for several days in neighbouring deserts, bringing only a tent with them, or sleeping out in the open, surrounded by such an impressive, complete silence. Bill Viola is one such artist who has included the desert’s dimension in his work. “The solitude of the desert is the first form of visionary technology,” he argues. “It plays an important part in the history of religion. People have used it to listen to voices from the past and from the future, to become ‘prophets’, to perceive images or, like the American Indians, to welcome the ‘search for vision’. It seems that when noise and daily confusion is reduced to a minimum, our usual control valves let go and this enables images to emerge from the deep.“³ The desert is a place where man’s cosmic dimension is able to emerge; the artistic field is like an ascetic field, where man can be confronted with his own solitude and liberate the images that inhabit him. Even if I am more sensitive to artists’ ‘mystical’ experiences, it seems that the prison-like universe of the monastery, the absolute faith in God, can bring man to penetrate into unknown provinces of the soul and to produce spectacular images.

Looking at these hills covered in mist, Denys l’Aéropagite’s words come to mind. An interpreter of Christian Neoplatonism, he defines divinity in his Mystical Theology like a “luminous fog, fog which secretly instructs… darkness which secretly instructs… darkness full of light (which) is neither a body, nor a figure, nor a form, that does not have a quantity, nor quality, nor weight, that does not have sensibility and does not have a meaning… that is neither a soul, nor an intelligence, that does not have an imagination, nor opinion, that is not a number, nor order, nor scale… nor substance, nor eternity, nor time… that is not darkness and neither is it light, that is not a mistake and not the truth either.” Is this not the manifesto of a vision that could have pushed back the barriers of the unfathomable? One that could have had the strength to throw itself into the abyss, to find the measure of true human freedom.

¹ Umberto Eco, ‘Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages’, Published by Grasset and Fasquelle, 1997, 18
² G. Duby, ‘Europe in the Middle Ages’, Flammarion, 1984, 85
³ Valentina Valentini (a cura di), Bill Viola, ‘Vedere con la mente e con il cuore’, Gangemi editions, 1993