This hermitage stands a little above a thousand metres, inside a beech wood and beside a spring, along the old way that linked two fortresses of the Matese. It is no accident: water, wood, shelter and a road. A mountain hermitage always grows up where the walker needs to stop.
What to see
The church has a single nave, a wooden ceiling and the statue of the saint on the high altar. Attached to it is a refuge, added much later, with an arcaded portico on two sides built in the twentieth century. Tradition has it that the saint it is dedicated to lived on the milk of a hind.
On its foundation the local sources do not agree: they date it between the ninth and tenth century as a monastic house, but attribute it to the Templars or the Cistercians, orders that did not yet exist at that time. It is the typical case of village memory applying to an ancient place the prestigious names it happened to know. What is certain is that in the eighteenth century two hermits still lived here, and that for centuries the place sheltered travellers crossing the massif.
Visiting
Until 1976 you could only get here on foot; then a road was opened that passes a few hundred metres away. Access is free, but the church opens mainly for services and for the feast. An hour.
Our editors' tip
Leave the car on the road and walk the last stretch, short as it is. For a thousand years this was the only way to arrive, tired, with the wood opening suddenly onto the clearing: changing your means of transport for the last five minutes completely changes the arrival, and it is the only thing here you can still choose.