‘You can feel all the years of prayers here’

Opposite the Pope’s summer residence Andrew M Brown discovers an ancient religious house catering especially for British visitors One of the joys of travelling alone is having proper conversations with people other than your travelling companions. It’s what I find on a recent weekend at the Villa Palazzola, an ancient religious house on a hillside by Lake Albano, 18 miles south-east of Rome, where seminarians from the Venerable English College in Rome used to spend their summers. Now, this enchanting spot is open to anybody.
Fr William Glasswell is doing chaplain duty when I visit. He’s a stout, jolly, urbane parish priest, currently of Dalton-in-Furness. He’s a keen traveller and in the past has worked as a chaplain for the Apostleship of the Sea as well as on the QE2. He likes to sip a glass of gin and tonic on the terrace. In this environment – with the stunning vista of the lake and the sea in the distance, the fine weather, the healthy breeze – people unwind, he thinks.
“Being up high is important,” he says as he inhales an invigorating gust of Marlboro Light. “Being nearer to God. We’re English: we don’t like to talk about faith. But when people come to a place like this they open up and come up with extraordinary insights.
“Often people can use this as an opportunity to unburden themselves in a way that they wouldn’t do at home. They come with all sorts of problems, any number of things, and they can talk to a priest in strictest confidence. They find people to listen to them here. People can go home having experienced healing – I know that’s an awful cliché – but it’s true.” Humans have found the site conducive to health and contemplation from the earliest times. It sits in a green and fertile forest, high on the volcanic slopes of Monte Cavo, and looks down on the dark waters of the lake made from the crater of the extinct volcano. From the villa you can see, on the other side of the lake, the bright white outline of the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.
In pre-Roman times the Latin people made sacrifices to Jupiter on the top of Monte Cavo. A rich Roman built a villa where Palazzola is today and you can still see, near the entrance, a consul’s tomb carved into the volcanic rock. A Portuguese Franciscan called Fonseca founded the modern Palazzola in the 1730s. For a brief period, in the 1900s, a doctor named Arnaldi set up a sanatorium for the treatment of nervous disorders. He adorned the walls with health-giving maxims. I notice one – the only one remaining – above the doorway in the refectory. It says: “Mangiare adagio e masticare bene” – eat slowly and chew well. When the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 wiped out all his patients, Dr Arnaldi’s sanatorium folded and in 1920 Arthur Hinsley, rector of the English College, persuaded him to sell the villa to him.
For 300 years seminarians had used a house near Frascati to escape the stifling heat of Rome. But by the end of the Great War there were more seminarians than that house could accommodate, so Hinsley decided on Palazzola as a replacement. After Vatican II, though, it was felt that priests in training needed to gain experience in English parishes during the vacation, and the Villa fell into disuse. More recently, parish priests with fond memories of their summers at the English College started to take out groups of parishioners. Now, the management has spruced the place up and installed en-suite bathrooms in many rooms. Increasing numbers of holidaymakers book independently or come as part of an organised tour (such as the ones Anthony Coles organises).
Of course if you want to be alone, there are paths through the forest to explore. It’s possible to disappear to a far corner of the garden and recline in the sun with only the gekkos, and a pair of rare hoopoes that nest in the grounds, for company. In the place of the vegetable plot which the long-serving caretaker Alfredo Paicentini once tended (his son Giuseppe still works at the villa) is a neat arrangement of box hedges, rows of bay trees, cypresses, abundant flowering plants – among them fuchsias, roses, pelargoniums, oleander, hibiscus and golden-yellow brooms. All over the place, trees are weighed down with fruit – limes, olives, walnuts, cherries and figs.
For Palazzola to remain a thriving concern, it needs to extend its appeal more widely. But is there a risk that in modernising and encouraging more visitors, Palazzola will lose its distinctive Catholic character? Gaynor Powell thinks not. Her retirement last year came as a shock. She felt “dropped off a conveyor belt”. But she clearly loves Palazzola and has been coming for 20 years. “You have to move forwards to make it work,” she says. “It’s [a question of] retaining its character and yet moving with the times. And getting young people in.” It’s not like a hotel, where everybody sits separately. For meals, served at fixed times – pasta, a main course and dessert, with wine – everyone sits together at long tables either in the beautiful garden overlooking the lake or, when it’s cooler, in the refectory. The atmosphere is relaxed: the people who are staying when I visit are on holiday, they say, not on retreat. But the guests like the fact that there’s always a chaplain around to celebrate Mass in the Gothic chapel each day and whatever people want – Benediction, Confession or just to talk.
Margaret Herd, a Glaswegian retired dentist who lives in Rutland, has been coming for eight years, twice some years.
“It raises you,” she says. “Even if you’re not a falling-onyour-knees Christian, if you’re living your Christian life every day and not just a Sunday Christian. It makes you accepting of anybody you meet here. We’re all going to the same place but I’m on the number 11 and you’re on the number 37. Here, without making you feel holy holy holy, you feel better in the world. Hands-on Christianity I call it. Getting out there and making a difference to other people’s lives, for the right reasons, and quietly, not boasting about it.” I went on a born-again Christian holiday once. Everything was organised, semi-compulsory and nothing was spontaneous. The Villa Palazzola is different. There’s a sense of Catholic relaxation about it. The religious dimension is there, if you want it. As Louise Sage – a medical secretary and regular visitor – says: “You can feel all the years of prayers. It’s in the stone. You’re mesmerised by it.” To contact the Villa Palazzola email [email protected] or call 0039 06 947 49178. Fullboard en suite rooms are €100 pp, €65 in low. Meals are three course and include wine