When reading up on a place where unending successions of peoples become part of that place’s tapestry and of its layers of development down through time, I find a mind boggling collusion between geography and history that won’t let up. This is exactly the experience I had while researching the Abbey of Montecassino.

Montecassino. A rocky hill with an elevation of 520 meters above sea level, part of Italy’s Apennine mountain chain, located about 130 kilometers southeast of Rome. This spot is perhaps best known as the site of the noted Battle of Montecassino, or The Battle for Rome as it’s also called, during the Second World War. In this article we look into how this particularly gruesome battle, analyzed in prose and in film, was but one of a series of events, catastrophic and fortuitous, that rained down on this hill from time immemorial.