" It is simply
a room in which visitors of either sex may partake of such food as the
poor Franciscans can furnish them, which is by no means such as the
more well-to-do Carthusians of Camaldoli supply to their guests. Nor
have the quarters set apart for the sleeping accommodation of male
visitors within the cloister anything of the spacious old-world
grandeur of the strangers' suite of rooms at the latter monastery. The
difficulty also of arranging for the night's lodging of a female is
much greater at La Vernia. There is indeed a very fairly comfortable
house, kept under the management of two sisters of the order of Saint
Francis, expressly for the purpose of lodging lady pilgrims to the
shrine. For in former days--scarcely now, I think--the wives of the
Florentine aristocracy used to undertake a pilgrimage to La Vernia
as a work of devotion. But this house is at the bottom of the long
ascent--nearly an hour's severe climb from the convent--an arrangement
which necessarily involves much additional fatigue to a lady visitor.
George Eliot writes to Miss Sara Hennell on the 19th of June, a letter
inserted by Mr. Cross in his admirable biography of his wife--"I
wish you could have shared the pleasures of our last expedition from
Florence to the monasteries of Camaldoli and La Vernia. I think it
was just the sort of thing you would have entered into with thorough
zest." And she goes on to speak of La Vernia in a manner which seems
to show that it was the latter establishment which most keenly
interested and impressed her.
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