Like most, you
have probably said, "if you've seen one coniferous
gymnosperm, you've seem them all." (Alas, how many
moments have we wasted over that single phrase!) Yet, on
the premises of the little church of the Madonna of the
Cypresses just above the town of Fontegreca not too far
from Caserta in the mountains of the Matese area of
Italy, there is a grove of such trees that you must see.
The Matese, with its
regional park and highest karst* lake
in Italy, is one of the areas in Italy where you go to
get away from it all. "It all" has been in and out of
the area many times over the millennia: there are Roman
and Samnite ruins, medieval castles (such as the nearby
Castello di Prato Sannita), and much more recently, the
armies of WWII swept past to converge ferociously on
nearby Monte Cassino. Yet the area has always managed to
restore itself, to live up to the inscription, from the
book of Isaiah, on the wall inside the tiny church
The glory of Lebanon
shall come to you, The cypress, the pine, and the
box tree together,
To beautify the place of My sanctuary; And I will
make the place of My feet glorious.
That shows
you just how much you know about Lebanon. Forget the
cedars. Come see the cypresses. I know that Isaiah says
that they will come to you, but you have to meet them
halfway. That point is in the 200–acre cipresseta (cypress
grove, pictured above) that climbs both slopes
above a cascading stream on the grounds running up from
and beyond the church (pictured, right). The
origins of the religious sanctuary are in the eighth
century, and the cyprus grove has been the object of
traveller curiosity and then botanical interest since
the 1600s. The stream is fed by the Sava river higher up
in the valleys of the Apennines.
Apparently,
the particular species of cyprus on the premises of this
now protected park is unique in Europe. Girolamo, the
gentle and jovial caretaker of the grounds —the
gentleman who keeps the water-mill running!— says that
no one knows how the trees got there and that they are
not members of the species Cypressus Sempervirens, common
elsewhere in Italy and apparently brought originally by
the Etruscans, whom even Girolamo does not remember. Sempervirens, or
one of its cousins, even provided the wood for the gates
of Constantinople, which lasted 1,100 years. Here endeth
the lesson in historical dendrology.
*Karst: A landscape
formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks
including limestone, dolomite and gypsum. The
word, itself, is the German name of Kras, an area
in Italy and Slovenia, where it is called Carso
and where the phenomenon was first studied. Karst
areas are characterized by sinkholes, caves,
underground drainage systems and collapse
triggered by the development of underlying caves
(Reference: Palmer, A.N., 1991). "Origin and
morphology of limestone caves" in the Geological
Society of America Bulletin, v. 103, p 1-21.
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Cypress Grove