Greccio

Greccio sits at 705 meters on a forested ridge above the Rieti valley, fifteen kilometers from Rieti in the Sabina. Francis of Assisi came here in December 1223, recalling his pilgrimage to Bethlehem fifteen years earlier, and asked the local lord Giovanni Velita for a cave where he could stage a representation of the Nativity. On Christmas Eve the friars and villagers gathered in the rock chamber with a manger, an ox and a donkey; one of the friars said Mass and Francis preached. Greccio has been making versions of that scene every Christmas for eight centuries, and the Cappella del Presepio was built into the cave itself in 1228, the year of Francis's canonisation.

The medieval village runs along the ridge above the sanctuary, separated from it by the wooded slopes of the Monte Salto del Cieco reserve, so the walled center and the cave church remain two distinct places linked by a single climb through beech and oak woodland. Greccio is one of four shrines forming the Sacred Valley of Rieti, and the arrangement of a hilltop village standing apart from its own founding cave is what gives the place its shape: a settlement that grew beside a site it did not begin as, built to keep watch over a single night eight centuries old.