pilgrims who went towards Italy and Europe. Among them there was King Donough O ' Brien, youngest son of Brian Boru, who, once he arrived in Rome in 1064, renounced his title and entered the Roman monastery of " Santo Stefano Rotondo ", where a memorial tells us about his death.
The Visio Tungdali of 1149, written by the Irish monk, Marcus, influenced Dante in his Divina Commedia, as well as many others European writers. At the same time the highest Italian Poet excercised a great fascination upon many Irish writers, including Ciaran Carson, Louis MacNiece, Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats, both Nobel Prize for Literature.
The knowledge of reading & bookmaking made of them counsellors in Charlemagne’ s Court and of other kings, teachers and educators, publishers and very well respected people in many other fields. According to Arthur Porter, from Ireland, England learned her later writing. From these monks Europe received again culture and values, hope and an Irish style of Christianity. Daniel-Rops, the most important historian of Church History, writes: The history of this Celtic Christianity is a history which has not always met with the notice it deserves, but anyone who studies it fairly, will find, it is of capital importance.
They left us with master pieces like the Book of Kells, the most beautiful manuscript, created between the 8th and the 9th century. Also the development of a form of confession fully private, of which an equivalent did not exist in the continent, is attributed to them. They were truly at the centre of the new Christian life in Ireland and Europe, as St. Columbanus and St. Cathaldus. Coumbanus left from the, the most eminent representative of Irish ascetics, land of the ultimi habitatores mundi – the inhabitants of the world’ s edge-, from the small port of Bangor, offering a great contribution to the common
European house, as a restorer of civilization in the old Continent.
At the age of 50, he started his pilgrimage throughout Europe, passingfrom England and Cornwal to Britanny around 592; then he went from the Northern Provinces of Gaul, descending along the Moselle, up to Oberland and to the Uri canton in the heart of Switzerland, in Costance; Bregenz in Austria was his next stop; finally, Milan, Pavia and Piacenza saw him as pilgrim before settling in
Bobbio, in the Spring of 613. Tradition wants that he stopped also in San Colombano al Lambro, on the river of the same name, of which the poet Redi wrote: bel colle / cui bacia il Lambro il piede / ed a cui Colombano il nome diede.( beautiful hill whose foot the Lambro kisses and to whom Columbanus gave the name).