Anghiari and the High Tiber Valley in general has had a tradition of monasteries and abbeys for more than a thousand years. The references to them in the Sacred Year 2000 were not then, just touristic blurb but a true invitation to reflection and a discovery of a magical tour, off the usual beaten track: small places where you can touch with your hands the marks left on the stones by unknown artists and architects, where multicoloured marbles make way for stones quarried from the local rivers and mountains, a total immersion in that Italy which, through its Romanesque gems, had come back into the light after the centuries of the Dark Ages.