Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Gabriel Ellison-Scowcroft

Gabriel Ellison-Scowcroft is a photographer, writer and radio producer whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the Globe and Mail, among others.

Left, Giovanni Maria de Agostini, a peripatetic Italian monk who was banished from Brazil, reached northern New Mexico on foot in 1863. He holed up on a mountain that would become known as Hermit Peak, today the object of an annual pilgrimage. Right, view of Hermit Peak.

The Inspiring Monk Who Lived in a New Mexico Cave

The mountaintop home of an Italian hermit who lived in the U.S. in the 1860s still attracts a handful of pilgrims