Rebuilt Monastery, Aided by Beer Sales, Gives Hope to a Quake-Struck Region
They may have chosen a contemplative life of prayer, detached from world affairs, but last month a small community of Benedictine monks threw a very big bash for the opening of their new monastery on a hill overlooking the central Italian town of Norcia, where St. Benedict was born.
After a Mass and a seated dinner for 1,000 — about half of them Norcia residents — the monks officially settled in, eight years after a devastating earthquake upended a sizable part of Norcia and destroyed their previous space.
At the festivities, they served “Nursia,” their craft beer whose sales supported the restoration of the 16th-century capuchin monastery that the community had bought after returning to Norcia 25 years ago, following a two-century hiatus. The celebration was also a moment of hope for an area struggling to revive itself after the earthquake compounded years of depopulation.
“They could have left after the earthquake,” Alberto Naticchioni, a former mayor of Norcia, said of the 20 monks. “Instead they rolled up their sleeves and started rebuilding. It gave an important signal.”
Norcia was among the 138 central Apennine towns and villages devastated by earthquakes in 2016. Two months after a temblor in the region killed nearly 300 people that August, Norcia was shaken by a magnitude-6.5 earthquake — the strongest in Italy since 1980.
