In Assisi people climb towards the basilica of Saint Francis and forget to look downhill. At the other end of the town, just inside Porta San Pietro, there is a Benedictine abbey founded in the tenth century and documented from 1029, which is the quietest place in the city: a lawn in front, a straight façade, and almost nobody.
What to see
The front is a perfect rectangle, cut off flat instead of ending in a gable: it was to be finished with a pointed top and never was, and that absence gives it a severe geometry found nowhere else in Umbria. Above there are three rose windows, a large one in the middle and two small ones at the sides.
Inside, the church was rebuilt in the thirteenth century in Romanesque forms already touched by Gothic, with a high bare nave and a dome over the chancel, which for the Umbria of those years was a novelty. There are no fresco cycles and no gold: there is stone, proportion and silence, which is what the Benedictines were after.
Visiting
The abbey is in piazza San Pietro, in the lower part of Assisi, ten minutes on foot from the basilica of Saint Francis; free entry, closed at midday. Twenty minutes. The lawn in front is a good place to stop.
Our editors' tip
Make this comparison in the same afternoon: first Saint Francis, with its two superimposed basilicas, Giotto, Cimabue and the crowd; then come down here and sit inside for ten minutes. They are two opposite ideas of what a church should be, five hundred metres apart, and the second is only understood after the first.