The Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia of Barcelona is located in the Barrio Gotico and dates back to the 13th century.
The Archives of the Cathedral are on the roof, where there is a kind of suspended garden, and from its windows you can look inside the Cathedral from above. The ribs of its columns, which open like flowers, suck you up and take you away from your present, in a past that, at least to me, is less frightening. Every now and then my friends make fun of me because I hardly know anyone from my neighborhood, but I know the names of the inhabitants of Albenga by heart from the 1400s ... I confess that there are advantages: in the meantime, you never fight, and it's not bad ...
I've always been a bookworm: it won't be a boast, but I don't mind. That year I ended up in Barcelona to look for something ... as if there was a strength, a sixth sense, which pushed me to go there, to boil my eyes on thickly written parchments, often illegible ... I went to the Archive every day, I began to search with holy patience and faith. The problem was that I didn't know what ...
Every now and then I was distracted listening to the sound of the bells that with different tones marked the hours, and in my hands I had ancient and dark envelopes. I don't know where my mind was. At some point I realized that I kept reading the same sentence, like a nursery rhyme or a mantra, but it was nonsense. Until I understood that the meaning was there indeed: “in 1011 a couple of lords of the Court of Catalonia had made a donation to the Monastery of Saints Maria and Martino of the Gallinaria Island of the Diocese of Albenga, of the Order of San Benedetto !! !! "
Someone said to me: "Shhhh !!!!" and I apologized. I actually yelled the last part of the sentence! A donation to the Gallinara Monastery! How many times had I reread it! It really was written on it.
Perhaps that couple did not have children and heirs and at that time the monasteries in Spain were a bit in decline ... So there was a tendency to lean on European monasteries, and the two gentlemen had decided to leave their possessions to a monastery that surely it was important and thriving. Perhaps they had embarked on a pilgrimage, which had brought them by land to Albenga and from there to the island, where the Abbey was in its splendor ...
I felt short of breath: they were huge properties, including a castle, certainly of great political and military importance ...
It was like when you start doing a puzzle and you are not so convinced, because the pieces all look the same and you don't think you will ever get through them. Then at a certain point you find the way and start shooting to insert one card after the other, suddenly understanding what those clear ones, those grays, those shadows were ... Now I looked at the parchments with different eyes. Finally I saw the thin thread that linked very distant places for those times ... The exchange of land in front of the Cathedral of Barcelona, received by the abbot: an important position, but unusable by the Gallinara ... And so the brothers had left by sea, and we know their names: among them the musician monk, who perhaps helped with his notes to make prayer more pleasant ...
I went ahead with the connections, almost afraid of my daring: Sant'Eulalia is the patron saint of Barcelona, who dedicated the Cathedral to her. But in Albenga the district overlooking the Gallinara, towards the port, a place of trade, is called Sant'Eulalia ... In fact, Christianity was spread by merchants, by those who moved ...
In Albenga the first Christian base, San Clemente, is located near the port area ...
It was as if I were at the loom, weaving a wonderful warp, where historical connections err the prize for my constancy: I had tears in my eyes, the documents confirmed theses that were previously only dreams or lucubrations. From there you could start to give the right value to our island and its monastery, now abandoned. And in fact this is where my ... our journey along the Via di San Martino began.