The Sacra di San Michele, the abbey suspended over the Susa Valley

Anyone travelling up the Susa Valley sees, on the summit of Mount Pirchiriano, a mass of stone that seems to grow straight out of the rock. This is the Sacra di San Michele, one of the great abbeys of medieval Europe, recognised by law since 1994 as the symbolic monument of Piedmont. Its position, at almost a thousand metres above the valley, has always made it a place of pilgrimage, power and legend.

Origins between history and tradition

The foundation of the Benedictine monastery dates to the last decades of the tenth century, between 983 and 987 according to the most accepted chronology, on the initiative of the Auvergnat nobleman Hugh of Montboissier. An older tradition tells that a hermit, John Vincent, already lived on the mountain and that the archangel Michael appeared to him asking for a sanctuary to be built. It is also said that angels carried the building materials up to the summit by night.

The dedication to the archangel is no accident. In early medieval Europe the cult of Michael, leader of the heavenly hosts and vanquisher of the dragon, was often linked to high places: the sanctuary on the Gargano in Apulia and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy are the most famous examples. The Sacra joined this network of sanctuaries and became an important stop along the pilgrim routes leading to Rome.

The Stairway of the Dead and the Zodiac Door

The church is reached by the so-called Stairway of the Dead, a steep flight of steps partly cut into the rock. The name comes from the custom of placing the bodies of monks along its walls, and until the twentieth century some skeletons could still be seen there. It was a constant memento mori for those climbing towards the altar, a symbolic passage from death to light.

At the top of the stairway stands the Zodiac Door, a masterpiece of Romanesque sculpture attributed to Master Nicholas and datable to the twelfth century. The jambs display the signs of the zodiac and some constellations, accompanied by inscriptions. The theme has nothing heretical about it: in the Christian Middle Ages the zodiac represented the order of the cosmos created by God and the cycle of the liturgical year.

Fair Alda and the line of Saint Michael

The best-known legend of the Sacra is that of fair Alda, a young woman who, pursued by mercenary soldiers, is said to have thrown herself from the tower entrusting herself to the Virgin and landed unharmed. The tale continues with a moral ending: having tried the leap a second time out of vanity, before witnesses, the girl died. The cliff from which she is supposed to have fallen is still pointed out as fair Alda's leap.

In recent times the idea has arisen of a sacred line of Saint Michael, an alignment that would join several Michaelic sanctuaries across Europe, from Ireland to the Holy Land, by way of Mont-Saint-Michel, the Sacra and the Gargano. This is a modern suggestion: the sanctuaries arose at different times and in different circumstances, and no medieval source speaks of a route designed on purpose.

Today the Sacra is entrusted to the Rosminian fathers, to whom King Charles Albert handed it in 1836, and it also holds burials of members of the House of Savoy. Climbing to its terrace lets us grasp the deep meaning of the place: a fortress of faith built on the border between sky and earth, where documented history and legend have lived side by side for over a thousand years.