Pennine Alps and Apennines. The Penna de la Vernia rises very
steeply from the rolling ground below, and towers above the traveller
with its pyramidal point in very suggestive fashion. The well-wooded
sides of the conical hill are diversified by emergent rocks, and the
plume of trees on the summit seems to suggest a Latin rather than a
Celtic significance for the "Penna."

It is a long and tedious climb to the convent, but the picturesque
beauty of the spot, the charm of the distant outlook, and above all
the historical interest of the site, rewards the visitor's toil
abundantly. There is a _forestieria_ here also, within the precincts
of the convent, but not within the technical "cloister." 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. She was in fact under the spell of the
great and still potent personality of Saint Francis, which informs
with his memory every detail of the buildings and rocks around you.
Each legend was full of interest for her.