A Sacred Place Through The Centuries

A Story Nearly 1,000 Years in the Making
To know the full story of Madonna della Selva, we must start from the beginning.

Long before there was a chapel called Madonna della Selva, long before there was a village called San Giovanni Incarico, people were already building their lives along the rivers, hills, and fertile countryside of this part of Italy.
When I reflect on it all today, that is one of the things I find most awe-inspiring and hard to fully take in.This little place that somehow became part of my life did not begin with me. It did not begin with the family who owned it before me, or even with the medieval monks whose presence here can be traced back nearly a thousand years.
The story of this land began long before any of us.
What It Was Before Christ — The Ancient Liri Valley
In 328 BC, more than three centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ, Rome established the Latin colony of Fregellae along the Liri River. Fregellae became an important city within the expanding Roman world. But in 125 BC, after rebelling against Rome, the city was conquered and destroyed. Only a year later, in 124 BC, the Roman colony of Fabrateria Nova was established nearby, on what remained of Fregellae. Today, its archaeological remains survive within the modern territory of San Giovanni Incarico, near the meeting of the Liri and Sacco rivers. These ancient settlements were part of the ancient world that surrounded what would eventually be where Madonna della Selva would stand—the communities, roads, farms, and rivers that occupied this part of the Liri Valley centuries before Christianity arrived.
People lived here.
They built homes and raised families. They farmed the land. They traveled Roman roads and worshiped the gods of the Roman world. Then, hundreds of miles away in a small eastern province of that same Roman Empire, something happened that would eventually transform this land forever.
The Time of Jesus
Around AD 30–33, during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, Jesus Christ was crucified in Jerusalem by Pontius Pilot. At that moment, the people living here in the Liri Valley probably had little reason to know His name. There were no Christian churches scattered throughout the Italian countryside. There was no Madonna della Selva.
There was simply a small group of people proclaiming something extraordinary:That the man Rome had been crucified as the "King of the Jews", had risen from the dead three days later. Those people began carrying that message outward. From Jerusalem, the Gospel traveled across the Mediterranean world.

Eventually, it reached the very heart of the empire. Rome.
Peter & Paul — The Gospel Reaches Rome
Among the men whose lives became inseparable from the spread of

Christianity were the Peter and Paul. Peter was an apostle who had walked with Jesus.
Paul had once persecuted Christians before his conversion and later became one of Christianity’s greatest missionaries. Within only a few decades of the Crucifixion, Christian communities existed throughout the Roman world, including Rome itself.
During this time, following Christ in Rome could come at an extraordinary price.
Christians were persecuted under Emperor Nero, and in AD 64-67,

both Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome. Peter was crucified, with ancient Christian tradition later recording that he was crucified upside down. Paul, a Roman citizen, is believed to have been executed by beheading. They died within the same Roman world that governed the people living here in the Liri Valley.
But Rome could kill the messengers.
It could not stop the message.
From Persecution to Christian Italy
Christianity continued to spread from one generation to the next.n Homes became places of worship. Communities of believers formed. Periods of persecution came and went, but the faith continued moving throughout the Roman Empire.
In AD 313, Emperor Constantine and Licinius established legal toleration for Christianity.
The faith that Roman authorities had once tried to suppress could increasingly be practiced openly.  In AD 325, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, one of the defining councils of early Christianity.  By AD 380, under Emperor Theodosius I, Nicene Christianity had become the imperial religious norm. The world surrounding the Liri Valley was changing. The Western Roman Empire eventually disappeared. Ancient cities declined. Kingdoms rose and fell. Populations shifted, and new communities developed among the hills. But Christianity remained. And as the ancient world gave way to

the medieval one, monasteries became places of prayer, learning,

agriculture, hospitality, and community.
St. Benedict & Montecassino
Around AD 529, St. Benedict established the monastery of Montecassino, not far from this region. The Benedictine tradition would profoundly influence the religious and cultural landscape of this part of Italy. Centuries passed. The Roman world of Fregellae and Fabrateria Nova became distant history. Christianity had become woven into the life of the Italian countryside.
A Community Called San Giovanni
By the early medieval period, a Christian settlement was developing 
And somewhere along the way, the name San Giovanni became attached to the community. The saint was St. John the Baptist — San Giovanni Battista.
This distinction matters. It was John the Baptist who prepared the way for Christ, who called people to repentance, who baptized Jesus in the Jordan, and whose ministry came immediately before the beginning of Christ’s public ministry.
By around the year 1000, local history places a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista here. The ancient Roman landscape was becoming a distinctly Christian medieval one.
Then, in the countryside outside the settlement, another religious community appeared.
The 1020s — Santa Maria della Selva
Here is where Madonna della Selva is written into the story: Nearly one thousand years ago, during the 1020s, local parish history records that an abbot named Giovanni, son of Dodo, established a small church-monastery dedicated to Santa Maria in the countryside of San Giovanni Incarico. A small community of monks lived and worshiped here.
And in 1030, the religious site appears in the documentary history identified by both the local parish and the Comune of San Giovanni Incarico.That date has become deeply meaningful to me. Because 1030 is not simply a number on a timeline.
It means that nearly one thousand years ago, people came to this countryside to pray.
Someone stood somewhere on this land, sought God, and surrendered to knowing Jesus Christ. Someone believed this quiet place among the hills and trees should be set apart for Our Lord. Long before the villa stood beside the chapel, long before the families whose names we are now rediscovering, and centuries before any of us were born, faith had already taken root here. In the centuries that followed, Santa Maria became associated with San Benedetto de Bagnarola and is described in local parish history as a cella—a smaller dependent monastic establishment. But history is not preserved only in parchment and official records. Sometimes it survives because generation after generation refuses to stop telling a story. And one of those stories may explain the name by which this place is still known today.
How Madonna della Selva Received Her Name
Local tradition preserves a beautiful story about the origin of the devotion to Madonna della Selva. According to the story preserved by the parish: a family of landowners lived here, and their young daughter became gravely ill. Her parents feared they might lose her. One night, while suffering from fever, the girl dreamed of a beautiful woman dressed as a country woman. She appeared to the child among the thick vegetation and told her that she would recover. When the girl awoke, according to the tradition, she was healed.
In gratitude, part of the family’s farmhouse was transformed into a small church or chapel containing an image of the Virgin Mary. And because the woman in the girl’s dream had appeared among the dense woodland and vegetation—the selva—the Madonna venerated here became known as:
Madonna della Selva
Our Lady of the Woods
It is important to distinguish this beautiful local tradition from what we can establish through surviving historical documents. The religious site itself is traced by local parish history to the 1020s, with documentary evidence identified from 1030. The story of the sick child, her healing, and the farmhouse belongs to the tradition passed down about the later development of the devotion and chapel. We may never know every detail of exactly when one chapter became another. But perhaps that is

part of what makes this place so compelling.

Some of its history survives in documents.

Some survives in stone.
Some survives in inscriptions and old photographs.
And some survives because people remembered.
Nearly One Thousand Years Later
The buildings changed.
The families changed.
Kings, emperors, barons, governments, and armies came and went.
There would be war.
There would be loss.
There would be generations of families who prayed here, celebrated here, mourned here, and carried the name Madonna della Selva forward.
There would eventually be a villa beside the chapel.
There would be new owners.
There would be world wars and occupation, bombing and fighting in the surrounding countryside. There would be children who, according to local memories we are still researching, came to this place for school. There would be electricity brought to the contrada. There would be weddings, feast days, processions, Masses, prayers, and generations of people who simply knew this little church as part of home.
And eventually, there would also be silence.
Buildings age.
Families move away.
Records disappear.
Stories become memories, and memories disappear with the people who carried them.
Places that once seemed permanent can slowly be forgotten. Yet somehow, Madonna della Selva remained.  And then its story traveled somewhere I never could have expected. All the way across the Atlantic.
All the way to Texas.
And Then It Found Me
I did not grow up in San Giovanni Incarico. My family did not worship in this chapel for generations. I did not inherit Madonna della Selva through some long family line.
I found this place from thousands of miles away. And for reasons I still cannot fully explain, I could not forget it. When I traveled to Italy and purchased the chapel and adjoining villa in 2025, I thought I was buying a historic property that needed to be saved.
What I did not understand yet was the depth of the story I was stepping into.
Since then, the more I have researched, the more humbling it has become.
This place existed before I was born. People were praying here centuries before my country existed. Its story stretches backward through generations I will never know and names I am only beginning to discover. And that has changed the way I think about ownership. I don’t really consider myself the owner of Madonna della Selva.
I consider myself its steward. For this small chapter in a story that began nearly a thousand years ago, this place has been entrusted to my care.
My responsibility is not to erase its age. It is not to make everything new.
It is to understand what came before me, preserve what remains, restore what time has taken away, and make certain that the story does not end here.
Repair rather than replace.
Preserve rather than remove.
Restore rather than recreate.
And perhaps someday, long after my chapter has ended, someone else will stand in this same place and wonder about the people who came before them.
I hope they will know that in our time, we chose to save it.
I hope the doors of the little chapel will still open. I hope Scripture will still be read here.
I hope prayers will still be spoken here. And most of all, I hope that after nearly one thousand years, Madonna della Selva will remain what it was created to be—a place where people come seeking God, and are taught Christ Risen, Because this story did not begin with us. And, God willing, it will not end with us.