Mount Asinajo

Mount Asinajo is the setting of Filippo’s long retreat from the world with his young son: a secluded place where he tried to form the boy wholly in religious devotion, far from ordinary sights and desires. Its isolation later gives way to the son’s first journey to Florence, making the mountain the measure of how little of worldly life he has seen.

Retreat and Setting

After his beloved wife died, Filippo resolved to leave the world and devote himself and his little son to God. He gave away his possessions as alms and settled with the child in a small hut on Mount Asinajo, where they depended on alms themselves. The mountain is presented not as a developed community but as the setting for their deliberately spare life.

A Life of Seclusion

For many years Filippo kept the boy within the hermitage. He guarded against talk of temporal things and did not let his son see them, directing his attention instead to eternal life, God, and the saints. The boy learned prayers and, as far as he could remember, saw no one but his father and nothing beyond the hermitage. Mount Asinajo thus marks not merely physical distance from the city but the boundary of the son’s entire early experience.

The Mountain and the First Journey

Filippo sometimes went to Florence to seek support from religious-minded friends, then returned to the hut. When the son was eighteen and Filippo old, the young man proposed that he accompany his father and meet those who helped them, so he could later make the journey himself. Filippo agreed, believing the boy’s years of religious instruction had made him unlikely to be drawn away by worldly things. Their departure from Mount Asinajo leads directly to the son’s first encounter with the city and its unfamiliar sights, exposing the limits of the sheltered education the mountain had made possible.