Under the parapet of the ambo there are seven small niches. The middle one once held an eagle with open wings, doing duty as a lectern; the other six are filled with Benedictine monks in high relief, each caught at a different task, ora et labora carved in stone. The ambo carries the date 1223 and is the finest thing at Santa Maria del Canneto.
What to see
The church stands in the district that gave it its name, on the valley floor near the river Trigno, where reed beds once grew. The earliest document naming it dates from about 706, when Duke Gisulf I of Benevento gave it to the Benedictines of San Vincenzo al Volturno. By 1097 it appears among the properties Pope Urban II confirmed to Oderisio, abbot of Montecassino, the handover probably following the Saracen destruction of the Volturno monastery. Of that first building nothing structural survives, only reused fragments of the eighth and ninth centuries, set into the tower-like facade and the campanile.
What stands today is eleventh- and twelfth-century work: a Latin cross plan, three naves under open timber trusses, each closing in a semicircular apse. The columns are Roman, salvaged from some building nearby and topped with Romanesque capitals; Roman and medieval inscriptions are embedded in the outer walls. On the right rises the bell tower, a crenellated Gothic shaft with three-light openings, finished in 1329 by Abbot Nicola. Behind the high altar stands the fourteenth-century Gothic statue of the Madonna di Canneto, known here as the Virgin of the Smile.
Visiting
The facade promises little: no decoration to speak of beyond the relief in the portal lunette. The interior is austere and rewards slow looking, because the story is all in the detail, the capitals, the carving around the doorway, the six monks on the ambo. Beside the church, excavations have uncovered the remains of a Roman villa of the first century AD: people were living here long before the Benedictines arrived.
Our editors' tip
Roccavivara keeps a devotion tied directly to this sanctuary: families send seven girls and one elderly woman down to Canneto to lay their wishes and intentions before the Virgin. Back in the village a dish waits for them, the Sagn' de la Madonne, home-made pasta dressed with sauce or with vinegar and spices, then shared out among the others. Time your visit right and the church stops being a monument and goes back to doing what it was built for.