The abbey of Montecassino is a Benedictine monastery on the top of the mountain that overlooks Cassino, 516 metres above sea level. It was founded by St Benedict of Nursia in 529, on the site of a temple of Apollo, and is the first house of the order: the Rule was written for this community. Its history is a series of destructions and rebuildings. The Lombards destroyed it a first time in the sixth century, the Saracens a second time in 883; refounded in 949, it was entirely rebuilt at the end of the eleventh century by Abbot Desiderius, the future Pope Victor III, who brought mosaicists from Constantinople. Then the earthquake of 1349 brought it down. On 15 February 1944, during the battle of Cassino, an Allied bombing razed it to the ground again; the archive and the most precious documents had been taken to safety. The rebuilding aimed to reproduce exactly the architecture that had been destroyed, and in 1964 Pope Paul VI consecrated the new abbey church.
What to see
You enter through the entrance cloister, in the area where the temple of Apollo stood, which St Benedict turned into an oratory: at the centre of the garden is a bronze group of the death of the saint, of 1952, the work of Attilio Selva and a gift of the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Next comes the cloister known as Bramante's, in Renaissance style, built in 1595, with an octagonal cistern at the centre and the Loggia del Paradiso looking out over the Liri valley; at the foot of the stairway stand the statues of St Benedict and St Scholastica.
Higher up is the Cloister of the Benefactors, of 1513, designed in all likelihood by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger: along the sides are lined the statues of popes and sovereigns who over the centuries protected the abbey, from Gregory the Great to Charlemagne. From here you enter the abbey church, where the tombs of St Benedict and his sister St Scholastica are. The library holds, among thousands of old volumes, the placiti cassinesi, among the first documents in the vernacular.
Visiting
Montecassino is an inhabited monastery: opening times, museum and rules of access should be checked with the abbey before going up.
Our editors' tip
Looking at the church, bear in mind that the paintings that decorated it no longer exist. In the eighties of the twentieth century the abbot therefore commissioned a series of frescoes from Pietro Annigoni, who worked on them with some of his pupils.
