FROM HERE TO THERE AND BACK: TRAVEL DAY 20

Ave Maria Grotto

We just took a visual tour around the (mostly religious) world, in about 45 minutes! Don't believe us? Here's picture-perfect proof!

St. Peter's Square in Rome...

Bethlehem...

Great Wall of China...

The Colosseum in Rome ... the walls of Avila, Spain

A pyramid ... a pagoda

Ascension of Christ and Abraham's Tomb in Israel...

OK, so we really were in one remarkable place, Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, AL. Somehow I had run across this incredible work of art as I was looking for some fascinating things to see on our tour, and it became imperative that we visit this site.

Ave Maria Grotto, in Cullman, AL, is a landscaped, 4-acre park in an old quarry on the grounds of St. Bernard Abbey, providing a garden setting for 125 miniature reproductions of some of the most famous religious structures of the world. It was added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage on February 24, 1976, and to the National Register of Historic Places on January 19, 1984.

The stone and concrete models are the work of Brother Joseph Zoettl, a Benedictine monk of St. Bernard's, who devoted some 50 years to the project, the last three decades (1932 to 1961) almost without interruption. They incorporate discarded building supplies, bricks, marbles, tiles, pipes, sea shells, plastic animals, costume jewelry, toilet bowl floats and cold cream jars.

Born in 1878 in Bavaria, Joseph was maimed in an accident that gave him a hunchback. He immigrated to the United States as a teenager, settling in northern Alabama. Soon afterward he began studying at the newly founded Benedictine monastery of St. Bernard’s, where he took his vows in 1897. He ran the monastery’s power plant and was, even by a monk's standards, a withdrawn, quiet man. Until his death in 1961, Joseph rarely left Alabama.

The display is strung out along a forested trail that winds down past several building clusters built into a steep hillside. Roman Catholic cathedrals and monasteries predominate, along with scenes from ancient Jerusalem, whence the grotto's sobriquet, "Jerusalem in Miniature." Half of the hillside features buildings and scenes from the Holy Land. Also displayed are number of secular buildings and the occasional pagan temple, Spanish missions, German castles, South African shrines, Hansel and Gretel's Temple of the Fairies, and even the St. Bernard Abbey power station, where the monk worked shoveling coal.

Though executed in great detail, the scale of the edifices is often distorted, with towers and buttresses too large or small. Just the same, it all adds to the whimsy and majesty of the grotto.

This place really spoke to me, in tones perhaps too personal for others to perceive. Or understand. Something...

Well, out of the many, many fascinating interpretations of beautiful, sacred architecture (and others mundane), this one became my instant favorite:

And then the 15th state on our travels... the last one before our home state!

Trees taking over our road:

For you big-city-folks, maybe these scenes don't mean much, but we felt happy that we do not live in Atlanta... Saturday morning rush to and from the city? Where is everyone going? We were betting on a football game until the traffic was two-directional.