1 - Trek 34 - A ring path around Santo Mount

La Beccia – Icebox – Sasso Cavallino – Croce alla Calla – La Verna – La Beccia Seductive hiking ring in one of the most beautiful woods in Italy. The tour is complementary to the previous one and both are consequential to the visit of the Sanctuary: the description of the latter goes beyond the limits of this work and yet one cannot avoid remembering that Verna has two churches, cloisters, courtyards and buildings of beautifully preserved stone service, the largest concentration of Robbian majolica in the world (as many as 16, datable between 1475 and 1517: the two most famous, the Annunciation and the Nativity, of very delicate grace, are in the upper church) and a museum small but extraordinary (with a wooden crucifix by Michelangelo, sacred furnishings, illuminated manuscripts, liturgical vestments, three painted panels, different sculptures, a refined terracotta by Luca della Robbia, reliquaries and relics including the disturbing hood of friar Giovanni della Verna, of the About 1290, and finally a reconstruction of the ancient conventual environments, such as the apothecary, the kitchen and the Common Fire room, each with i ts furnishings tili originals). Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, there is the architecture of the whole complex which is a mixture of building and nature, or rather, where the former has perfectly adapted to the latter. The caves with the Bed of San Francesco and the Sasso Spicco, bypassed by the Corridor of the Stigmata (which in fact is a sort of bridge thrown over what were originally isolated rocky pinnacles), together with the Precipice and, of course, the sublime Forest, they constitute not only a frame to the Sanctuary but an integral and deeply suggestive part of it. In this sense, the Park, as the promoter of a naturalistic culture, does nothing but receive and continue a message – the Franciscan one – almost eight centuries old.