The Saint’s staircase hangs down from the cliffs of Valetto, spiralling into thin air. It’s all that remains of the house in Umbria where a disciple of St Francis of Assisi lived until 1695, when a massive earthquake cleaved a third of the town into the canyons below. Because Valetto sits on a pedestal of volcanic rock—an island jutting up from the valley floor—the spiral staircase appears to float, a twist of wrought iron eerily suspended between the chestnut groves below and the twelfth-century church spire above.
Over the centuries, as Valetto has dwindled from a town of three thousand to just ten full-time residents, including my mother’s family, the staircase has become a favourite spot for reckless tourists and ruminating locals. Some have claimed otherworldly vistas from the stairs: apparitions of the medieval saint or visitations from the dead.
As a boy, when I visited the town during the summers, I’d get up early to see the fog rolling up the riverine mouth of the valley, and climb down onto the bottom lip of the stairwell so I could stand sheathed inside a cloud for fifteen minutes, watching my hands slowly disappear at the railing. But then one morning, as I descended, my throat thickened with dread as an enormous figure loomed toward me through the haze. And that feeling returned over the years. It came for me on suspension bridges and high rooftops, in an elevator stuck between floors, and in the waiting rooms of hospitals.
I’d find myself descending through that fog, halfway down the stairs and filling with dread before I reminded myself that it was all a trick of light and perspective, that it wasn’t real. Somany times, I told myself that figure must have been simply a shaft of early sunlight glinting down the aperture of the narrow valley, projecting and refracting my silhouette into a cloud of vapour. Still, I avoided the stairwell until one harrowing November night nearly four decades later.
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