Monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo

The Monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo of the Discalced Carmelite Fathers, a Catholic place of worship located in the hamlet of Bocca di Magra, in via Santa Croce, in the municipality of Ameglia in the province of La Spezia.

Monastery and hotel with event rooms dedicated to spirituality surrounded by a landscape with an enchanting nature.

The uniqueness of this unrepeatable place where the Santa Croce monastery is located.

A house of spirituality and hospitality ready to host all year round those who wish to spend a period dedicated to rest, prayer and deepening their spiritual journey in an oasis of peace and serenity within a unique natural setting.

It is possible to organize conferences and stays with families and groups, and there is the possibility of having self-managed spaces.

HISTORY
The primitive monastery was founded on the promontory of Santa Croce in 1176 by bishop Pipino Arrighi of the diocese of Luni thanks to the donation - on June 2 - of the land ("32 giove di terra") to a monk ("monacho de Corvo"). However, according to historical sources, the existence of a primary chapel in which a wooden crucifix is ??kept is datable even before the year 1000. The works for the construction of the monastery proceeded briskly with the entrustment of the same to the Benedictine monks of San Michele di Pisa in 1186.

In the fourteenth century the complex was abandoned, as well as the precious crucifix, and it was only in the seventeenth century that a careful restoration of the church, with the roof of the apse, brought the building back to its opening.

The entire area was acquired in the second half of the nineteenth century by the Fabbricotti family, wealthy marble industrialists, who settled there their home. The area was therefore enriched with the monumental park and the beautiful neo-Gothic style castle.

Towards the middle of the twentieth century the entire property, as a consequence of the Fabbricotti bankruptcy, was taken over from Monte dei Paschi di Siena by the confraternity of the Ligurian Province of the Discalced Carmelite friars on the initiative of Cardinal Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero and transformed into a center for spiritual retreats and selected hospitality.

Made famous by the fascinating memories of Dante and Boccaccio, for which the structure is the seat of the Lunigianese Center of Dante studies, in the seventeenth-century chapel of the ancient monastic area the exceptional nature of the Holy Cross has always been preserved, a wooden Christ in pure Romanesque style -Byzantine ascribable to the X-XII century, whose story is closely linked to the Relic of the Precious Blood which is kept in the co-cathedral of Sarzana.

CURIOSITY'
In his biography of Dante, Boccaccio narrates the unlikely, but evocative episode of how the poet, leaving for France, had entrusted the manuscript of the canticle of Hell to a monk named Ilario of the monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo so that he delivered to Uguccione della Faggiola, intending then to allocate the subsequent canticle of Purgatory to Moroello Malaspina and that of Paradise to the Aragonese king Federico of Sicily.

Map: Monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo