Boscodon Abbey in the French Alps

Up a little road among trees with the Alps in the background; the signs to reach the place are good, you park in a small car park next to it, and the area is very rural: meadows, woods, nature and vegetable gardens. The abbey is almost anonymous from the outside; a small clearing in front of the entrance, a bit shaded, hosts a group of French tourists with a guide. We enter the abbey and go from the sun into darkness and coolness. When I entered it gave me that sense of austere, solitary, grey and closed..... but strangely it doesn't give a feeling of sadness or claustrophobia. The abbey is very tall, with curved ceilings, all in rough stone. A sense of peace and tranquillity seeps into your bones; it is long and narrow, with chairs at the sides, and the altar is nothing but a bare pulpit with a puppet Jesus in wood, simply stylised and fixed to the wall, dark all around.

The two niches at the sides of the altar are dedicated to two saints, with a place for candles and an offertory basket. As narrow and long as it is tall, it is an abbey with a strange structure, vaguely Gothic, vaguely like a Dario Argento film. An adjoining little room, more 'cheerful', has a lectern, a small altar and benches. Wooden statues depicting shepherds, children and scenes of life are placed in the lectern room. Inside there is a pervading coolness; the eye grows used to the strange light filtering from above, plays of shadow, no artificial lighting switched on. I walk down the nave to leave and I wonder about the reason for the darkness in a place that should give comfort and faith. At the exit the sun blinds me. Some leaflets and a poster at the entrance advertise the place, its history.....

in the dirt path towards the car park there is a little souvenir shop that I check out for my usual personal souvenir, the 'fridge magnet'. The vegetable garden nearby makes me feel centuries back; it feels like the era of peasant settlements, an era of fiefs, of farming, of rurality..... Everything is simple here; there is silence, there is tranquillity. And off we go again for a new adventure.