What does it take for an extraordinary journey? A myth? A fairy tale?A special place? Well, to answer this simple but straightforward question, I’ll tell you all three. Today we are talking about the famous legend of the sword in the stone, a mythical, indeed wonderful story that manages to amaze anyone who reads it in books or on the internet. This legend seems to come true in a forgotten abbey in the municipality of Chiusdino, in the province of Siena. Here, an ancient sword is embedded in a rock and, as in the legend of the mythical Excalibur, only the hilt and the handle come out.
The only difference is that the British king had pulled the sword from the rock as proof of his worth as a man and a warrior, but in this case it is the exact opposite: Galgano Guidotti was a young man who lived in the 12th century and whose life was devoted to debauchery. But one day he had a vision of the Archangel Michael which prompted him to become a knight and dedicate himself to war. A second vision, which he had around the Montesiepi hill, made him abandon his life and convert. As a symbolic gesture of this conversion, he drove his sword into the rock.
And there you have the mythical Italian legend of the sword in the stone. The Abbey was built between 1218 and 1288 by Cistercian monks who normally built their monasteries near rivers (the Merse in this case) and along important roads (the Maremma).
