L’Hermitage of the Holy Spirit, o Holy Trinity Hermitage, is located in the municipality of Roccasecca, right at the beginning of the Roccasecca-Casalvieri road (the “Tracciolino”), where the narrow valley of the Melfa meets the Liri Valley, on the steep slopes of Monte S. Nicola, a few kilometres from the other very interesting hermitage of S. Angelo Asprano, near Caprile. We ascend following a steep path carved into the rock, once we reach the “Ponte Vecchio” over the Melfa. The ascent gradually reveals to the eye the suggestive scenery of the mountains on the two banks of the river and the Tracciolino, which follows the same path of the Melfa, passing now on its left bank, now on its right. The place, highly evocative and “dramatic” (so much so as to suggest in itself the presence of the Sacred), overlooking the river, must have appeared, to the first hermits of the early Middle Ages, to be the most suitable for worship and spiritual retreat.
The first settlement, certainly prior to the year 1000, was built inside a natural cave, which was later adapted and integrated with walls to house several monks’ cells when they decided to build a small church on two levels and other ancillary works: an oven, a shelter for animals on the right side of the church façade, and supporting walls, perhaps to create small vegetable gardens. The scarcity of water and the distance from the Melfa obliged the monks to create an ingenious system for collecting, channelling, through channels cut into the rock, and storing, in a large cistern, the rainwater: works that are still visible today. The only element of certain temporal reference is a stoup, today inserted in the wall of the small single-nave church, which bears the letters SST MC. They probably indicate the “Holy Trinity” and the date 1100.
This suggests the existence, at that date, of the church consecrated to the Trinity, but certainly not the date of its construction, which could be earlier, perhaps the 11th century. , a period of great affirmation and diffusion of Benedictine coenobia in our territory, especially thanks to the reinforcement and expansion of Montecassino ordered by Abbot Desiderius (1058-1087).
Unlike the nearby hermitage of Caprile, that of the Holy Trinity has no frescoes. The paintings and sculptures present today are all very recent and, to tell the truth (in my personal opinion) often disturb, with their new and vivid colours, the austere and straightforward sacredness of the place.
