About an hour north of Rome, the Monastero Trappiste di Vitorchiano was opened in 1957, when the community moved into the abbey, and today is home to around eighty sisters of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, better known as the Trappists. The order follows the Benedictine principle of ora et labora (“pray and work”), understanding work above all in a manual and agricultural sense. For the sisters,
farming is not simply labour but a contemplative act, a way of living in harmony with nature rather than possessing it.
