Then began for Gioacchino a life of wandering from convent to convent, which carried him even as far as Lombardy, to Verona, where we find him with Pope Urban III.
When he returned to the south, a group of disciples gathered around him to hear his explanations of the most obscure passages of the Bible.
Whether he would or no he was obliged to receive them, to talk with them, to give them a rule, and, finally, to instal them in the very heart of the Sila, the Black Forest of Italy,[37] over against the highest peak, in gorges where the silence is interrupted only by the murmurs of the Arvo and the Neto, which have their source not far from there.

The new Athos received the name of Fiore (flower), transparent symbol of the hopes of its founder.[38] It was there that he put the finishing touch to writings which, after fifty years of neglect, were to become the starting-point of all heresies, and the aliment of all souls burdened with the salvation of Christendom.

The men of the first half of the thirteenth century, too much occupied with other things, did not perceive that the spiritual streams at which they were drinking descended from the snowy mountain-tops of Calabria.
It is always thus with mystical influences.

There is in them something vague, tenuous, and penetrating which escapes an exact estimation.

Let two choice souls meet, and they will find it a difficult thing to analyze and name the impressions which each has received from the other.
It is so with an epoch; it is not always those who speak to her the oftenest and loudest whom she best understands; nor even those at whose feet she sits, a faithful pupil, day after day.