Subiaco Shrine

“Beneath the lakes”: the name and the site

The name Subiaco comes from the Latin Sublaqueum, “beneath the lakes”: the town grew up downstream of three artificial lakes formed by the waters of the Aniene at the bottom of the gorge.^[4] These lakes were not natural: they were created by dams built in Roman times to supply an imperial residence. From the very beginning, the site thus combined three features that make it unique: abundant, untamed water, a steep-sided gorge inviting withdrawal, and the ruins of an imperial luxury which monastic asceticism would come to cover over.

Nero’s villa and its lakes

Before any monastery, Subiaco was the site of a vast villa of the Emperor Nero (Villa Neronis), built around 60 AD along the Aniene.^[5] For the delight of this residence, three dams were raised on the river, creating as many lakes; the highest of these dams, long the tallest in the ancient world, collapsed only in 1305.^[6] Of this villa there still remain today, along the Via dei Monasteri leading to the abbeys, a cistern, the remains of baths and a nymphaeum.^[7]

The detail is no anecdote in the history of the place: it was in the nymphaeum of this villa that, according to tradition, Saint Benedict in the 6th century converted the apse of the first of his monasteries, dedicated to Saint Clement.^[8] The Christian shrine of Subiaco was thus born, literally, on the walls of an imperial palace — an image which medieval chroniclers would read as the victory of monastic humility over the pride of Rome.

The hermit’s cave

According to the Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great — the only ancient source on Benedict’s youth — he fled the dissipation of his Roman studies and withdrew around the year 500 into a rugged cave above the Aniene, near the ruins of Nero’s villa.^[9] He lived there three years in almost total solitude, known to none but a monk named Romanus, who, from the monastery perched above the cliff, let down bread to him on a rope fitted with a little bell.^[10] This cave is the Sacro Speco — the heart of the shrine, the fixed point around which everything else was built over the centuries.

“He lived three years in this cave, and none knew of him, save the monk Romanus.” — after Saint Gregory the Great, Dialogues, book II (life of Saint Benedict)^[11]

The twelve monasteries — and the thirteenth

When the hermit’s reputation for holiness spread, disciples flocked to him. Tradition, based on the Dialogues, reports that Benedict organised the valley into twelve monasteries of twelve monks each, under an abbot’s guidance, keeping a small group with himself — hence the local count of thirteen monasteries on the slopes of the Aniene.^[12] These foundations, scattered over the heights between Nero’s villa and the Sacro Speco, made Subiaco the first monastic network organised by the man the West would call the patriarch of monks, before his departure for Monte Cassino.^[13]

Saint Scholastica and the survival of two monasteries

Of the thirteen monasteries of the valley, only one has survived earthquakes, invasions and abandonments: the one Benedict had dedicated to Saint Sylvester and which later took the name of his twin sister, Saint Scholastica (Santa Scolastica).^[14] The Sacro Speco, for its part, is not one of the primitive monasteries: it is a shrine built in the Middle Ages around the hermit’s cave, as the cave became a pilgrimage destination. Today, the “shrine of Subiaco” therefore concretely means two distinct neighbouring ensembles: Santa Scolastica, the mother-monastery, and the Sacro Speco, the shrine of the cave. The biography of Saint Scholastica and the famous episode of her last meeting with her brother belong, likewise, to a dossier of their own.^[15]

Nine arches against Monte Taleo

The monastery of Saint Benedict does not rest on flat ground: it clings to the sheer face of Monte Taleo, at some 600 metres altitude. The edifice is held up by nine mighty arches and buttresses pressing it against the rock; at several points, the cliff itself serves as a fourth wall.^[16] Visitors climb through a succession of stairways, loggias and chapels cut into the stone, never finding a regular plan: the architecture follows the accidents of the rock, which gives the shrine its character as a vertical labyrinth unique in Italy.^[17]

The lower church (1244–1276)

The oldest built core is the lower church (chiesa inferiore), raised between 1244 and 1276 under Abbot Enrico.^[18] Arranged in three bays covered with ribbed vaults, it is almost entirely covered in frescoes. Here appears the signature of a major 13th-century painter, Magister Conxolus: on one of the frescoes can be read the inscription “Magister Conxolus pinxit hoc opus” (“Master Conxolus painted this work”).^[19] The scenes develop the miracles of Saint Benedict recounted by Gregory the Great — the poisoned bread, the monk Maurus walking on the waters to save Placid — in an iconography that would set the pattern for all Benedictine art.^[20]

The upper church

Above, the upper church (chiesa superiore), built around the middle of the 14th century, has a single nave ending in a semicircular apse.^[21] Its walls bear a great cycle of 14th-century Sienese-school frescoes — Passion and Resurrection of Christ, life of the Virgin — dominated by a vast Crucifixion.^[22] The two superimposed churches, linked by internal stairways, make the Sacro Speco an edifice of rare verticality, where one prays, literally, on several levels inside the mountain.

The Holy Stairs and the Saint Gregory chapel

A stairway called the Scala Santa, laid out under Abbot Giovanni VII (1068–1120) and later decorated with Sienese frescoes on the memento mori theme (the meeting of the three living and the three dead), leads down to the lower levels.^[23] It serves the small Saint Gregory chapel (Cappella di San Gregorio), dated 1228, which houses one of the most precious treasures in all Christian iconography (see below, the portrait of Saint Francis).^[24]

The Sacro Speco cave and Raggi’s statue

At the very depth of the shrine opens the cave itself, the Sacro Speco proper. There, where tradition places Benedict’s three years as a hermit, stands a marble statue of the saint carved in 1657 by Antonio Raggi, a pupil of Bernini: Benedict is shown standing, his face raised, in the attitude of contemplative prayer.^[25] The bareness of the rock, barely lit, contrasts with the profusion of frescoes around it: this is the silent point towards which everything else converges.

The grotta dei Pastori: the oldest frescoes

Lower still, the grotta dei Pastori (“shepherds’ cave”) preserves the monastery’s oldest frescoes: a Virgin and Child surrounded by saints of the Byzantine school, dated to the 7th–8th century.^[26] This detail matters for the history of the place: it attests worship and devotion on the spot long before the building of the two medieval churches, confirming the continuity of pilgrimage around the cave.

Eight centuries of wall painting

Few monuments offer so unbroken a panorama of Italian painting. On the walls of the Sacro Speco there follow one another, with no major gap, Byzantine frescoes of the 8th century, the 13th-century Roman school (around Magister Conxolus), the 14th-century Sienese school and Umbro-Marchigian contributions up to the 16th century.^[27] The cycles concentrate on three great themes: the Passion of Christ, the life of the Virgin and the life of Saint Benedict. The table below summarises this pictorial stratigraphy.

The oldest portrait of Saint Francis

The jewel of the shrine, and one of the most precious images in Western art, stands in the Saint Gregory chapel: a portrait of Saint Francis of Assisi painted in his lifetime, around 1223–1224, during his visit to Subiaco in the retinue of Cardinal Ugolino (the future Pope Gregory IX).^[33] Francis is shown there with neither halo nor stigmata — proof that the fresco predates 1224, the year of the Alverna stigmata — holding a scroll, with the inscription “Fr. Franciscus”.^[34] For the first time, painting does not recount a legend or a miracle: it delivers a portrait taken from life, by an artist who saw the saint and wished to fix his real features.

“Here we see, for the first time, not the illustration of a legend, but the face of a man whom the painter truly looked upon.” — The standard reading of art historians on the portrait of Saint Francis at Subiaco^[35]

The rose garden: Saint Benedict and Saint Francis

To this Franciscan visit is linked the Sacro Roseto, the monastery’s rose garden. Tradition reports that Benedict, assailed by temptation, threw himself naked into a bramble bush to overcome it; coming on pilgrimage in 1223, Francis of Assisi is said to have grafted thornless roses onto those brambles, and the rose bush has flowered ever since.^[36] Two founders of orders, two of the greatest saints of the West, thus meet on this same rock — which makes the Sacro Speco a place where Benedictines and Franciscans read their common history.

The oldest Benedictine monastery in the world

A little over a kilometre below the Sacro Speco stands the shrine’s other pole: the monastery of Santa Scolastica, founded by Benedict himself around 520 and endowed by the Roman patricians Tertullus and Æquitius.^[37] The sole survivor of the valley’s thirteen monasteries, it is the oldest surviving Benedictine monastery in the world and the mother-house of Subiaco’s monastic guardianship.^[38] It is also a living monastery: a community of Benedictine monks continues the regular life there according to the Rule, ensuring the place’s unbroken continuity.

The three cloisters

Santa Scolastica’s architectural originality lies in its three cloisters, layered in time, which alone form a textbook of medieval art history:^[39]

• the Cosmatesque cloister (13th century), the oldest, a masterpiece of the Roman Cosmati marble-workers — twisted colonnettes and polychrome marble inlay;
• the Gothic cloister (14th century), with pointed arches, adjoining the old library;
• the Renaissance cloister (16th century), the most recent, through which visitors enter today.

The bell tower and the abbey church

The Romanesque bell tower of Santa Scolastica, raised in 1052–1053, ranks among the oldest towers of its kind in Latium.^[40] The abbey church, by contrast, was entirely rebuilt in neoclassical style after 1770 by the architect Giacomo Quarenghi — the future builder of Saint Petersburg — which gives the monastery its striking contrast between medieval cloisters and an Enlightenment sanctuary.^[41]

Sweynheym and Pannartz at Santa Scolastica

It was at Santa Scolastica, and not in a city, that printing was born in Italy. Around 1464–1465, two German clerics from the Mainz region, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, set up the peninsula’s first typographic press in the monastery, probably summoned by the commendatory abbot, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (Giovanni Turrecremata), a great promoter of culture.^[42] The choice of a Benedictine monastery was no accident: Santa Scolastica possessed a scriptorium, a library and learned monks able to supply the texts to be set.

The first four books printed in Italy

During their three years at Subiaco, Sweynheym and Pannartz printed four works, one of which is entirely lost:^[43]

The Lactantius of 29 October 1465 is regarded as the birth certificate of Italian printing: it is the first dated book to come off a press on the peninsula, and it contains the very first Greek characters ever printed, cast in a typeface historians have ever since called the Subiaco type.^[48] The choice of texts — a Church Father nicknamed the “Christian Cicero”, the master of Latin rhetoric, then the City of God — says much about the humanist and Christian spirit of the enterprise.

In 1467, the two printers left Subiaco for Rome, where they continued their work. But it was indeed in the monastery of the Aniene valley that Italy entered the age of the printed book — a fact which adds to the shrine a cultural dimension with no equivalent among Italy’s great pilgrimage sites.

Lombards, Saracens and earthquakes

The material history of the place is a long series of destructions and recoveries. The valley monastery was ravaged by the Lombards (tradition places a devastation as early as the beginning of the 7th century), then burned by the Saracens in the 9th century (around 840), and struck again in the 10th century.^[49] Each time, the community rebuilt. The repeated earthquakes of the central Apennines also tested the buildings. The very survival of the shrine, after so many ruins, testifies to the tenacity of the Benedictine guardianship, which never definitively abandoned Benedict’s rock.

The commendatory abbots

From 1455 onwards, the abbey was given in commendam to cardinals: this commendam regime entrusted the monastery’s revenues to an outside prelate, often absent.^[50] Among these commendatory abbots are considerable names — Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, who brought in the printers, and above all Rodrigo Borgia, the future Pope Alexander VI, who fortified the town (the Castrum Sublacense).^[51] The commendam, which could impoverish the regular life, was abolished in 1915 by Pope Benedict XV, through the apostolic constitution Coenobium Sublacense of 21 March 1915 — Saint Pius X, commendatory abbot from 1906 until his death in 1914, having been its last holder — restoring the monastery to fully monastic government.^[52]

The 1944 bombing

Last major trial: on 23 May 1944, in the midst of the Second World War, the monastery of Santa Scolastica was bombed, like Monte Cassino a few months earlier. The damage was heavy, but the whole was restored in the following years, and both monasteries could reopen to monks and pilgrims.^[53]

The Territorial Abbey of Subiaco today

Subiaco is today a territorial abbey, that is, an ecclesiastical circumscription immediately subject to the Holy See, whose territory coincides essentially with the two Benedictine monasteries.^[54] The Benedictine monks guard the Sacro Speco and Santa Scolastica there, sustain the liturgical life, welcome pilgrims and preserve the historic library — a continuity of presence reaching back, through all the ruins, to Benedict’s cave.

A shrine of the patron of Europe

As early as the 13th century, Benedict’s cave had become a pilgrimage destination, and the Sacro Speco has never ceased to draw the faithful, artists and travellers.^[55] Its scope changed scale when Saint Paul VI proclaimed Saint Benedict, in 1964, principal patron of Europe: Subiaco, the patriarch’s first dwelling, became one of the symbolic places of the continent’s Christian identity.^[56] Benedictine pilgrims, youth groups, art lovers and tourists now cross paths there all year round.

The popes at the Sacro Speco

Several popes have come to Subiaco. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Pius VI and then Pius IX showed their attachment to the place.^[57] But the most famous visit of the contemporary era is that of Saint John Paul II, on 28 September 1980: coming to pray in the cave and venerate the patron of Europe, he delivered a meditation that has remained famous on the Benedictine motto.^[58]

“‘Ora et labora.’ In antiquity, work was the lot of slaves, the sign of degradation. To be free meant not to work, and thus to live off the work of others. The Benedictine revolution places work at the very heart of man’s dignity.” — Saint John Paul II, address during the visit to the Sacro Speco, 28 September 1980^[59]

On the eve of the April 2005 conclave, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the future Benedict XVI, who would place his pontificate under the patronage of the saint of Nursia — also came to pray in the cave, underscoring the intimate bond between the saint of the Aniene and the Christian memory of Europe.^[60]

Neighbouring pilgrimage shrines

Subiaco belongs to the network of great Italian shrines travelled by pilgrims: the Monte Sant’Angelo Shrine in Apulia, the oldest shrine in the West dedicated to Saint Michael, and the Manoppello Shrine of the Holy Face in neighbouring Abruzzo, are all stages of one and the same spiritual geography.^[61] For the tradition of withdrawal into the desert and the holy mountain, Subiaco may be set alongside the Mount Carmel Shrine.

The shrine of Subiaco is above all a place: a hermit’s cave turned, through strata of stone and fresco, into one of the most extraordinary monastic ensembles in Europe. For the life of Saint Benedict, his conversion and his Rule, see Saint Benedict of Nursia. For the order he founded and its influence, see Benedictine monasticism and Benedictine spirituality. On Italy’s other great pilgrimage sites, see Monte Sant’Angelo and Manoppello.