The Apennine Sibyl

The story

In 1420 a French traveller named Antoine de la Sale left the village of Montemonaco and began to climb a mountain.

It was not a mountain like the others. People spoke of it in low voices, in the taverns, all across central Italy. They said that up there, near the top, there was a cave. And that at the back of the cave a woman lived.

The Frenchman climbed, found the entrance, and did something few dared to do: he did not only look, but took paper and ink and drew the plan of the place. A great space, he wrote, with seats carved in the rock all around, as if someone had prepared a waiting room. Then he went back down to the valley and wrote down everything he had seen and everything he had been told.

Among the tales there was one, older and finer than the rest. It was the story of Guerrino.

Guerrino was a wandering knight. He did not know who his parents were, and to find them he had already travelled half the world. Someone had told him that the Sibyl, the prophetess of the Apennines, could tell him. So he set out and travelled as far as Norcia, at the foot of the mountains.

He lodged at the inn of a man called Anuello, and when the innkeeper understood where he wanted to go, he stopped smiling.

"Nobody goes up there," he said.

"I do," replied Guerrino.

The innkeeper took him to a castle and a hermitage, hidden among the woods. At the entrance of the cave three hermits kept watch, old, grey, silent as stones. The rule, they said, was only one: nobody who had gone into the cave had ever come out.

They also explained what awaited him. Inside he would find temptations of every kind, all designed to make him forget who he was and why he had come. And they taught him a prayer, to repeat whenever he felt lost.

Guerrino did not turn back. He made the sign of the cross and climbed.

The way was hard. He passed through rugged mountains, where the wind seemed to push him back, and reached the entrance. Inside the rock, the darkness smelled of damp earth and ancient stone. The torch threw a small circle of light, and outside that circle there was nothing.

He walked. At some point the passage grew narrow, then narrower. Beneath him an abyss opened, and over the abyss there was a bridge: so thin that you had to place one foot after the other, without looking down. Somewhere below, water boomed.

He crossed. And on the other side, in the dark, something moved.

It was a snake. But not a snake like the others: it spoke to him. It said its name was Macco and that it was a damned soul, turned into a snake and condemned to stay in that cave for two faults: laziness and envy. Guerrino listened without moving, his hand on his sword hilt, and then went on his way.

Further on lay the kingdom.

The knight entered the world of the Sibyl, and the Sibyl welcomed him. She was a fairy, a queen, a prophetess. She offered him everything a man can desire, so that he would stay. Guerrino agreed to stop, but only to understand.

The days passed. The weeks passed. Guerrino asked his question and the Sibyl answered with other words: she never said what he wanted to hear. Who his parents were, she never told him.

And meanwhile the kingdom tempted him. Every time he felt his will waver, the knight repeated in a low voice the hermits' prayer and called on the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Then the enchantment withdrew, for a while, like water from a shore.

A whole year he stayed down there. A year without seeing the sun, without feeling the wind, without knowing for certain whether outside it was winter or summer.

Then one day he understood that, if he waited any longer, he would never come out. Like those the hermits had spoken of.

The romance does not tell how he managed to leave the cave. It says only that, at the end of the year, Guerrino went away.

Once outside, the light almost made him weep.

But it was not over. He had spent a year in the sorceress's kingdom, and this, for the Church, was a sin. So he set out for Rome and appeared before the Pope. He told him everything: why he had gone in, what he had done, whom he had met. The Pope listened, and understood that the knight had never sought magic to do harm. He absolved him.

He imposed a penance, however: Guerrino had to guard the road to Santiago de Compostela, defending pilgrims from brigands, and then go to perform the last atonement at Saint Patrick's Purgatory, in Ireland, at the other end of the world.

His parents, Guerrino would find much later, and not thanks to the Sibyl. But that is another story.

In time the Sibyl frightened even the printers. After the Council of Trent, in the new editions of the romance her name vanished: in her place appeared a sorceress called Alcina, or simply "the enchantress". But on the mountain people went on calling her as before.

The cave, meanwhile, is still up there, near the summit. Today nobody lives there, nobody guards the entrance. But the shepherds, when they pass, lower their voices.