Cammino di San Francesco da Rimini a La Verna

On 8 May 1213, in the village of San Leo — the ancient Mons Feretri perched on its cliff in the Montefeltro — Count Orlando Catani of Chiusi in the Casentino donated the mountain of La Verna to Francis of Assisi. From that act stems, eight centuries later, the logic of a walking route: 107.2 linear kilometres that climb from Rimini through the Tuscan-Romagna Apennines to the Sanctuary of La Verna, in the municipality of Chiusi della Verna, in the province of Arezzo. Five stages, a gradual ascent, an itinerary that does not belong to the circuit of the great mass pilgrimages.

The route first follows the valley of the Marecchia river, a natural corridor that has channelled trade and devotion for centuries. Along this line one finds places that time has left in relative quiet: the Convent of the Friars Minor at Verucchio, where a cypress traditionally associated with the saint's passage still grows; the convent of Sant'Igne, founded in 1244 in the woods at the foot of the San Leo cliff; the convent of the Poor Clares and Friars Minor at Sant'Agata Feltria. San Leo itself — with its Piazza Dante and the plaque commemorating the 1213 donation — forms one of the narrative hinges of the whole itinerary. The landscape around these places is one of centuries-old woods, open ridges and fortified villages that the mass-tourism economy has brushed against without deeply transforming.

The destination is the Sanctuary of La Verna, on the mountain of the same name at 1,128 metres. Here in 1224 Francis received the stigmata: an event that has given this place a weight in Franciscan history matched by few other sites of the order. The sanctuary can also be reached from the Via di Francesco (Way of Saint Francis) coming from Assisi — a 189-kilometre route heading north that passes through Gubbio, Città di Castello and Sansepolcro — but those arriving from Rimini follow a different, less frequented path, one that builds the destination through the very geography of the Montefeltro and the Arezzo Apennines. The Foresta della Verna (La Verna Forest), with its beeches and firs, wraps the final kilometres in a vegetal setting quite different from the hills crossed in the earlier stages.

Monsignor Antonio Tani, in 1926, described La Verna as «the high, dark, mysterious one» — adjectives that capture something precise about the nature of the place, its verticality, its separateness from the valley floor. The walk from Rimini has the merit of gaining that altitude step by step, through a sequence of landscapes that make the arrival the result of a physical journey as much as a symbolic one.