We look for different things when travelling: somebody needs to see famous landmarks, others want to meet people and learn about their culture. I love discovering new dishes and flavours that tell the story of their land. Recently, I realised that I also travel in search of… silence. Big cities are thrilling and enlightening; they inspire and feed imagination. Yet, it is quiet corners of the globe that entice me. I am not talking about the quietude that you find within, I mean the stillness in the outside world. It takes you on a journey in time and space, and if you listen carefully, you realise that each place has its own silence.

Last year I went to see the Atacama Desert. The town of San Pedro de Atacama was pretty, but full of tourists and unnecessary noise. However, eight miles from San Pedro lay El Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon), peaceful and quiet. There was only one sign pointing left, off the main road that read “Valley of the Moon”. After a short bumpy drive on a dirt track, my boyfriend and I arrived to a locked barrier that clearly meant no cars beyond this point. The map said that the Valley was ahead, so we continued on foot along a white salt-covered road. It was an early spring morning, the chill was lingering in the air. Salt crackled loudly under our feet as we walked stopping to admire the incredible shapes, sparkling salt crystals and soft hues of pink grey and brown around us. After 30 minutes, we stopped at the edge of a cliff from which we could see the lunar landscape stretching into the horizon. There was nobody else, just the two of us, standing in silence, humbled by the formidable beauty of this vast terrain. Then I heard a faint short sound, like cracking of an eggshell. I turned around. Nobody. Another light “crack”, right beside me, and another one, a metre away coming from the ground. I bent down to listen and realised that the salt crystals cracked heated by the rising sun. Those subtle, barely audible sounds emphasized the stillness of the Valley. I will always remember it as the Silence of a far-away place.

Then there is another type of silence, which I encountered on a speleological adventure in the Frasassi caves[1], in Italy. We walked on the edge of a 30 meters deep pit, crawled on all fours in a long tunnel, climbed up a slippery wall, and squeezed ourselves through tight bottlenecks. All that while gaping at the grandeur of the stalactites, stalagmites, cascades, columns and crusts of calcium salts. At the end of the route, we stopped in a huge chamber, switched our helmet lamps off and sat in silence. It was pitch black. I could hear water drops falling from the top of the cave. That silence was primordial; it had not changed for one and a half million years since the caves formed here. Listening to it was like travelling back in time.

In Italy, in my search of quiet places I also happened to discover the silence that you might not want to share with anyone else. I was travelling along the Marche Spiritual Route on invitation from the regional tourism board. The trip took us, four bloggers, to a number of monasteries that welcome visitors. One evening, after a long drive on a windy mountain road, we arrived to the Fonte Avellana Monastery[2]. Built in the 10th century by a group of hermits, today it is home to nine Camaldolese monks, whose daily lives are filled with prayers and manual labour. Cesare, a monk who had been living at Fonte Avellana, showed us the library, refectory, cloisters, the chapterhouse. Fading frescoes, beautiful arches, huge dimly lit corridors. At the end, Cesare suggested to sit in silence in a chapel. He warned that it was not an experience for everyone but silence plays a big part in monks’ lives, so since we are here he invited us to try it. We sat still on pews, somebody thinking about their God, somebody curiously looking around. I was thinking about the overwhelming beauty of the monastery, the imposing Catria Mountain hanging over it, the people and centuries that these walls had seen. A few minutes passed, some of us exchanged glances looking for clues on what to do next. We understood what Cesare meant: this was the silence that bares your soul, the kind that requires solitude.

[1] Frasassi Caves: www.frasassi.com/
[2] Monastery Fonte Avellana: www.fonteavellana.it/