©
Jeff Matthews entry Oct 2014
The Benedictine Monastery
of San Vincenzo al Volturno
The great age of European
monasticism ended with the French revolution. It
had been a good run, though, starting in the
early 500s when Benedict of Nursia (“the father
of western monasticism”) founded the monastery
of Monte Cassino. Today, monasteries in southern
Italy fall into one of four groups: (1) those
that have survived as religious communities,
such as the splendid abbey of Monte Cassino
halfway between Naples and Rome, destroyed and
rebuilt four times in its long history (there are
also a few working monasteries in Naples); (2)
those that have been simply abandoned and left
to fall to pieces (usually up in the hills
somewhere); (3) those that have been converted
to schools, museums, hospitals and municipal
buildings (Naples is full of those); (4) those
that were long lost and are now being
rediscovered and at least partially
reconstructed as historical monuments, such as
the Benedictine monastery of San Vincenzo al
Volturno, one of the great centers of
culture and monastic life in Europe in the early
Middle Ages, one of the reasons that Petrarch's
“Dark Ages” were not totally without light. (An
artist's version of what it might have looked
like, image above.)
The old monastery grounds are in the
hills near the town of Castel San Vincenzo in the
province of Isernia, near the source of the river
Volturno about 100 km north of Naples. We have known
for a long time of the existence of the monastery from
a twelfth-century manuscript, the Chronicon
Vulturnense, written by a monk of the monastery
in 1130. He used sources from the eighth, ninth and
tenth centuries, probably in the monastery archives.
The manuscript includes many images and is in the
Vatican Library.
We know that the monastery was
founded in 731, a very important period in shaping
the future of Europe: the Roman empire was gone; the
terrible Gothic wars were
finished; and the productive and interesting period
of the Longobards was
about to finish up in 774 when the “father of
Europe,” Charlemagne arrived on the scene. He
founded the Holy Roman Empire and also put his seal
of approval on the formation of the Vatican (or Papal) States,
that large chunk of church property in central Italy
that would then stand in the way of a united Italy
for the next 1000 years. The other player at about
the same time was Islam. The Muslim faith had
successfully expanded in many directions, into
Spain, the Balkans, and it would soon make
successful moves on Sicily
and part of the southern Italian mainland.
The community of San Vincenzo al Volturno had about 300 members by the early 800s and had acquired other properties elsewhere in central and southern Italy. Then, trouble started. The Chronicle reports that in 848 the grounds were severely damaged by an earthquake. Then, in 860, what had by then become the Muslim center of Bari had to be bribed not to sack the monastery. Such events were termed “Saracen raids” at the time. That meant “Arab raiders.” (After the later Arab collapse in the face of Crusaders and Mongols, such raids continued, this time by Ottoman Turks; “Saracen” continued to be applied to them, as well. Raids lasted into the 1500s along the coasts of southern Italy.) In 881, Saracens raided and burned the monastery, and surviving monks fled to Capua. They returned in 914 to rebuild in a more defensible position on the other side of the river. The arrival of the Normans and their conquest of southern Italy (thus, beginning the kingdom of Sicily/Naples) eventually led to the breakdown of any independence on the part of the San Vincenzo monastery, even though such independence had been consecrated by various popes. In 1349 a new earthquake destroyed the monastery and left the area open to the expansion of the nearby abbey of Monte Cassino. The monastery of San Vincenzo was occupied by fewer and fewer monks, and by the mid-1600s the monastery and its properties were taken over by Monte Cassino.
The rebuilt church of
San Vincenzo al Volturno
The
abandonment of the monastery, the
removal of its goods to Monte
Cassino, natural changes in the
course of the Volturno river
(flooding sections of the premises),
locals picking through what was left
and carting it off —all that led to
the slow physical disappearance of
the monastery and the fading from
memory that there had ever even been
such an important light of
monasticism here.
The comeback
(archaeologically speaking) started in
the 1830s with piecemeal discoveries,
but real progress didn't start until
much later in 1935 when archaeologists
started to restore some frescoes and
make photographic surveys. The
property was further damaged by the
battles of WWII. Recall that this is
where the formidable German defensive
lines were strung coast to coast
across Italy to block the Allied
invasion from Salerno as it swept up
towards Rome. In the 1970s Dom
Angelo Pantoni, a monk from
Monte Cassino excavated part of
the area, and the San Vincenzo
Project, that is, large-scale
excavation of the property, was
supervised by Richard Hodges of
the University of Sheffield
beginning in 1980. He continued
supervising work on the premises
through the 1980s and 90s. (His
scholarly findings appeared in
book form as Light in the
Dark Ages: The Rise and Fall
of San Vincenzo al Volturno,
published by Cornell University
Press, 1997.) Interestingly, in
1989 San Vincenzo al Volturno
became home to a new monastic
community, the Benedictine nuns
of Connecticut, Regina
Laudis. Since 1999 the
project has been directed by
Federico Marazzi, of the Suor
Orsola Benincasa university of
Naples.
photos & images:
-artistic
rendering at top is on
the website of the San
Vincenzo a Volturno
project,
© Suor Orsola
University, Naples,
permission pending;
-photo by Flicker user Popix
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