Monte Cassino

The abbey of Monte Cassino was founded by Saint Benedict around the year 529. In the winter of 1944 it sat on a 1,700-foot hill above the road to Rome, looking down on the Allied line at the Rapido River. The German Gustav Line ran through the slopes beneath it.

On February 15, 1944, Allied heavy and medium bombers dropped more than a thousand tons on the abbey and left it as it appears here — a white ruin on the summit. German paratroopers then moved into the rubble, a better fortress than the building had been. Four assaults were needed between January and May. Supplies went up the trails on mules, at night, in the mud.

Polish troops finally raised their flag over the ruins on May 18. The abbey was rebuilt after the war and reconsecrated in 1964.

One break in the cloud, and it falls on the abbey. Everything else — the mountain, the sky, the valley floor — is painted in the same wet gray-brown, so the pale ruin on the summit reads almost as a light source. The mule train crosses the bottom edge in silhouette, small and slow, heading up toward it. Dead trees stand along the slope like the last of a fence. Notice how the cloud wraps the shoulder of the mountain and hides where the trail goes.