Foggia must be one of the dustiest, most unattractive towns in Italy; a settlement or conglomeration of utilities dumped at one end of the great drained plain where the only cheerful sights are the trim council villas of a Fascist period housing scheme, standing each in its decent stretch of ground. Occasionally a model village can also be seen bravely starting up round a brand-new modern church.

Driving on beyond Foggia, up into the Gargano peninsula, the mountain landscape grows ever bleaker in the colourlessness of cactus, dust, stone and lime. Above, on the ridge where lie Padre Pio’s great white hospital and smaller Capuchin monastery, the mountains stretch more forbidding still.

San Giovanni Rotondo, when at last we reached it, might have been any township in a Western film, with sand and stone and dust massed into larger lumps to form human dwellings. This must be the very back of beyond, the uttermost edge of the world. Nobody surely would come here except as a fugitive—from justice, from fellow-man, from the world. For here is no single redeeming feature, no single attraction except Padre Pio, the stigmatic Friar at the little Capuchin monastery at the top of the village.

To this unprepossessing place flock visitors from all over Italy and beyond. During my week at San Giovanni Rotondo I met Americans, Britons, Latin-Americans, Swiss, French and others, but mostly Italians. Not just ‘superstitious peasants’, but Italians of every class and degree. They are all there—one soon feels—for the same reason.