was after a
vision, in which he saw his monks mounting up into heaven dressed in
white, that he changed their habit from black to white--the habit they
still wear.

Whether it be that the hills and valley are indeed more lovely here
than anywhere else in Casentino, and that the monks and the hermits lure
some indefinable sweet charm to the place, I know not; yet I know that
I, who came for a day, stayed a month, returning here again and again
from less lovely, less quiet places. Camaldoli is one of the loveliest
places in Tuscany in which to spend a summer. Here are mountains, woods,
streams, valleys, a monastery, and a hermitage; to desire more might
seem churlish, to be content with less when these may be had in quiet,
stupid.

IV. BIBBIENA, LA VERNA

Some eight miles away down the valley, enclosed above a coil of Arno,
stands Bibbiena, just a little Tuscan hill city with a windy towered
Piazza in which a great fountain plays, and all about the tall cypresses
tower in the sun among the vineyards and the corn. Here Cardinal
Bibbiena, the greatest ornament of the court of Urbino, was born, of no
famous family, but of the Divizi. It is not, however, any memory of so
famous and splendid a person that haunts you in these stony streets, but
the remembrance rather of a greater if humbler humanist, St. Francis of
Assisi. You may see work of the della Robbia in the Franciscan church of
S. Lorenzo in the little city, but it is La Verna which to-day
overshadows Bibbiena, La Verna where St. Francis nearly seven hundred
years ago received the Stigmata from Our Lord, and whence he was carried
down to Assisi to die. The way thither is difficult but beautiful: you
climb quite into the mountains, and there in a lonely and stony place
rises the strange rock, set with cypress and with fir, backed by
marvellous great hills.

"Mons in quo beneplacitum est Deo habitare in eo."

It was on the morning of the 14th September 1224, in the Feast of the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross, that Francesco Bernadone received the
Stigmata of Christ's passion while keeping the Lent of St. Michael
Archangel on this strange and beautiful mountain. "Ye must needs know,"
says the author of the _Fioretti_, "that St. Francis, being forty and
three years of age in the year 1224, being inspired of God, set out from
the valley of Spoleto for to go into Romagna with brother Leo his
companion: and as they went they passed by the foot of the castle of
Monte