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The carpet bombing of Monte Cassino on 15 February 1944 by the Allies obliterated much of the hilltop Benedictine monastery, but presented an opportunity to trace its origins. Reconstruction began soon after the war ended. Plans were drawn up to rebuild the monastery, effectively as it had been. This was essentially an immense baroque and modern mass of buildings that, in plan, followed the great rebuilding executed by Abbot Desiderius after 1066. Desiderius’ monastery was one of the wonders of Latin Christendom and a model for churches and monasteries throughout Europe. Such was its scale and ambition that Abbot Odersius, Desiderius’ successor, was concerned that all appreciation of Monte Cassino’s patchwork of earlier buildings would be forgotten. As a result, he commissioned a young monk, Leo of Ostia, to prepare a chronicle (Chronica monasterii Casinensis; hereafter, CMC) about its history up until this time in the late 11th century. Leo’s book was never finished, but it provides an important framework for the architectural genesis of this iconic place from its foundation by Benedict of Nursia – author of The Rule of St Benedict in the 6th century – through to Desiderius’ great works.
Don Angelo Pantoni, who joined the monastery as a monk in 1928, was fascinated by Leo’s chronicle. Being an archaeologist, he soon began to trace Monte Cassino’s origins. Like many of the brethren, Pantoni was despatched to safety when the Allies arrived close to the monastery in December 1943. On returning to the devastated ruins, as the rebuilding began, he managed to undertake several excavations that would bring to life key episodes in Monte Cassino’s first half-millennium. For the following 40 years, until his death in 1988, Pantoni in a series of books and studies wrestled with making sense of the first Monte Cassino and how it grew, beginning in the Carolingian age when Charlemagne’s mentor Paul the Deacon (c.720s-799) was a monk here, and then over the course of the 11th century, before Desiderius.
New excavations at Monte Cassino’s ‘twin’, San Vincenzo al Volturno, a Benedictine monastery 50km to the east (see CWA 112-113), have shed further light on Pantoni’s investigations. San Vincenzo al Volturno lies at the source of the river Volturno, separated by a mountain pass through the Mainarde range from Monte Cassino. The monasteries shared parallel histories from the 8th century, with both being sacked by an Arab warband in the 880s. After this, Monte Cassino prospered, whereas San Vincenzo failed to re-establish its status until Cassinese monks – that is, monks from Monte Cassino – became its abbots in the 11th and 12th centuries. In the 14th century, San Vincenzo and its property, by now diminutive in size, passed to Monte Cassino, who still maintain a small convent there, close to the excavated remains of the 8th- to 12th-century monastery. Forty years of excavations have uncovered the main buildings of San Vincenzo as it evolved from a small Late Antique villa to a small 8th-century Benedictine monastery and thence into a sprawling city-like settlement after c.800. The excavations also bring to life its step-by-step renewal in the 11th century after its sack on 10 October 881.
Leo of Ostia’s chronicle about Monte Cassino, the investigations made by Don Angelo Pantoni, and the archaeological interpretation of San Vincenzo al Volturno help to make sense of one of the most influential places of Latin Christendom between the 8th and 11th centuries. Its buildings and decor undoubtedly influenced monastic and royal architects far and wide, as much as its leaders and thinkers shaped early medieval European views on morality.
Don Angelo Pantoni (1905-1988)
Angelo Pantoni was born in Florence on 5 June 1905. After studying engineering at Padua, in 1928 Pantoni joined the community at Monte Cassino as a Benedictine monk. He was soon drawn to researching the monastery’s history and archaeology. His article ‘Su di un’antica chiesa del monastero cassinese’ (1936) was the first of many publications. This led him to initiate small-scale excavations to locate the early, documented church of St Martin in 1942. Larger opportunities to excavate the celebrated monastery soon arose as Monte Cassino found itself on the front line between the Axis and Allied armies for six bitter months between 1943 and 1944. Pantoni’s post-war excavations started in 1946 and spanned a decade, with the main work being undertaken in 1947-1953.
Pantoni’s excavations were concentrated in two areas. One was on the summit of the hill, an erstwhile acropolis from (Iron Age) Samnite and Roman times, where the principal early medieval basilica of the monastery was located, constructed by Abbot Gisulf (797-817) and remodelled by Abbot Desiderius (1058-1086). Other excavations were also possible within the ruins of the later cloister on the midslope terrace below the acropolis. This included an area near the so-called Tower of St Benedict, which was previously investigated by Don Giuseppe Quandel in 1877-1880, and described in three unpublished manuscript volumes now in Monte Cassino’s archive. Pantoni’s notes show that he generally followed the post-war reconstruction work (in contemporary archaeological parlance, ‘a watching brief’), and used local workmen to excavate the churches of St Benedict and St Martin. In these excavations, he largely ignored stratigraphical relationships, concentrating instead on exposing stone and tile features. Apart from ecclesiastical buildings and tombs, inscriptions (many in fragments) proved to be the main discoveries in these excavations. No ceramics or glass, for example, are reported in Pantoni’s notes, nor in his monographs.
Pantoni was a diligent archaeologist, following in the footsteps of Leo of Ostia. As early as 1950, Pantoni published an interim report on the exceptional number of early medieval inscriptions found in the excavations. A year later, at the first Spoleto congress dedicated to the early Middle Ages, he contributed a paper on the 9th-century basilica of Abbot Gisulf. Annual reports followed as Pantoni prepared to publish his post-war excavations, culminating in two monographs: Le Vicende della Basilica di Montecassino (1973) and L’Acropoli di Montecassino e il Primitivo Monastero di San Benedetto (1980).
Pre-monastic Monte Cassino
Terrain determined the spatial arrangements of the early settlement until the 1070s, when improved engineering practices essentially made it possible to overcome the rugged configurations of the cone-like hilltop by deploying major terraces. That new arrangement essentially still exists today.
The acropolis, as it has been called, is a saddle-backed peak that is 520m above sea level. It commands a vast view along the valley to the north and south, as well as down towards the Tyrrhenian coast to the west. The peak stood proud above the roughly terraced girth of the hill – the midslope – that today accommodates the cloister, library, and archive. The natural rock falls away steeply from this area to a larger surrounding terrace some distance below. It is currently occupied by the monastery’s garden and a large car park. Located on this cone-like summit, the monastery was prominent to all travelling the Via Latina from Rome to Naples in the wide valley below.
Monte Cassino appears to have begun as an appendix to a major Samnite fortress (with stout polygonal walls) within which, during early Roman times, an ara or altar (according to Leo of Ostia’s account) dedicated to Apollo was constructed on the acropolis. Its exact location has not been found, but it is assumed, on the basis of Roman finds associated with it, to lie immediately south of the altar in the first church of St John the Baptist (the later church of St Benedict). It is likely that the area around this altar was terraced and, judging from the mixture of finds dating from the late prehistoric to Roman times, the temple was used for at least a millennium. On the midslope below, another temple was erected on a substantial U-shaped podium measuring 36.5m by 21m by 37m. Dedicated to an unknown deity, it remained a fixed point as Monte Cassino evolved.
Photographs from Pantoni’s excavations clearly show different styles of major stone construction in the podium. This suggests the temple underwent several rebuildings in Roman times. On these grounds, most of the podium found in Pantoni’s excavations was probably made in the later Republican era and belongs to the period when the town of Casinum grew up on the Via Latina at the foot of the hill (where modern Cassino exists today), far below the monastery. No traces of the temple were found on the podium. It was probably located towards the north-west corner of the podium, against which, to the east, the church of St Martin was constructed. To the west, at the south-west angle of the podium, St Benedict’s tower was erected. Were other, less substantial buildings associated with the podium? How long was the podium occupied by the temple? Both questions remain unanswered.
Monte Cassino’s first monastery
Most examples of early monasteries in the Latin West made expedient use of pre-existing ancient buildings, adapting these without recourse to any formula to serve their local residential purposes. Monte Cassino was no exception. Benedict came to this extraordinary place in the 530s, at a turbulent time in Italy’s history. For a generation, the senatorial class were concerned by the afterlife and increasingly investing in the Church. Benedict was born in 480 to a noble family in the Umbrian mountain redoubt of Nocera (Nursia), and travelled to Rome to study. The economic recession of the 6th century was setting in, though, and rather than return to the mountains he made a spiritual home for himself at Subiaco, south of Rome. Benedict chose a cave in which to live as a hermit, close to a villa of Neronian date. The cave now forms a part of the later (present) monastery at the site. After some years, Benedict left to found small monasteries in southern Latium, before arriving at Monte Cassino in 530. Here, he wrote The Rule of St Benedict, establishing what were to become the core values of western Christendom. Thus was Benedictinism born in the ruins of this ancient hilltop shrine. Benedict died in 547 at the height of the Justinianic pandemic, as Italy was entangled in a struggle between the Goths and Byzantium. Following his death, Monte Cassino became a shrine to Benedict. A generation later, around AD 600, his biography was written by Pope Gregory the Great. Thereafter, Benedict was revered as a saint, to be nominated as the patron protector of Europe in 1964.
The archaeology of the early monastery has to be disentangled from the ancient remains. We know from Leo of Ostia’s account that the earliest oratory dedicated to St John the Baptist occupied the summit of the acropolis, while another early church, St Martin, lay on the midslope below, within the shell of the ancient temple on the podium. Both were explored by Pantoni in his post-war excavations. Pantoni postulated that Benedict’s residence was erected against the south-west corner of the midslope temple podium. In this tower, overlooking the valley far below, as Benedict’s biographer Pope Gregory the Great records,
The venerable Benedict stood in the upper chamber of his tower… before which stood a large building where his disciples slept. As the brothers took their rest, Benedict, the man of God, having anticipated the time of prayer, was already keeping vigil. While he stood at the window, peering out into the night and praying to almighty God, suddenly he beheld a brilliant light from above, penetrating the darkness and driving it aside, its splendour surpassing even the light of day. An amazing thing then happened. As he later described it, before his eyes the entire world (omnis mundus) was gathered together as if in a single ray of sunlight.
In the case of this tower, the parallel with San Vincenzo al Volturno, Monte Cassino’s nearby peer, is striking. San Vincenzo’s 12th-century chronicler John believed that monastery occupied the site of Samnium, the capital of the pre-Roman Samnite tribes. Certainly, the excavations show the Samnite and Roman remains provided an inviting location for a Late Antique bishop or even monks in the 6th century. More to the point, a later Roman tower at San Vincenzo formed an axial residential focus in the 5th- to 7th-century settlement, and once again in the earliest, 8th-century monastery up until c.800. On this evidence, it is likely that St Benedict’s tower at Monte Cassino was well-constructed with strong foundations employing spoils from the ancient buildings and composed of two or possibly three storeys, rising above the adjacent temple podium.
Two issues are perplexing about the details of Benedict’s 6th-century monastery. First, the church of St John the Baptist is small by 6th-century standards (15.75m long by 7.6m wide). It was little more than a chapel, if Pantoni’s identification of its ground plan is correct. Does this presuppose other buildings lay around it, taking up space on the acropolis, limiting the size of the chapel? Second, Pantoni found no burials associated with the church. Only one funerary inscription is attributed by Pantoni to this period. Distinctive tile-lined cappuccino graves with funerary goods that typify mortuary practice in the later 5th to early 7th centuries are conspicuously missing from Monte Cassino. One explanation for this absence is that these readily identifiable tombs may – if the excavated monastery at San Vincenzo al Volturno is a reliable guide – have been concentrated in a dedicated funerary church adjacent to the basilica of St John the Baptist, which evaded discovery at Monte Cassino. At San Vincenzo al Volturno, the first phase of the South Church immediately below the residential tower served as a funerary church and was packed with Late Roman tombs. Only three or four other tombs were found elsewhere within the footprint of the later Roman settlement at San Vincenzo. By the mid-8th century, Pantoni believed, the enigmatic church of St Peter lay somewhere close to St John the Baptist on the acropolis. Reportedly funded by the Lombard king Ratchis, when he retired to Monte Cassino in AD 749, could this enigmatic shrine in fact have been an earlier funerary church dating to Benedict’s time, two centuries earlier?
St Benedict’s monastery was, in effect, a small villa-like settlement comprising a tower, two or three small churches, and in all probability a cluster of post-built dwellings. The watchword was expedience, as opposed to any grandiosity. The earliest Benedictine house was clearly grander than the cave at Subiaco but, bearing in mind the excavated remains from nearby San Vincenzo, hardly a major settlement. St Benedict’s monastery, as it happened, barely outlived him, being sacked by Lombards in c.AD 570. According to Leo of Ostia, it was refounded by monks from San Vincenzo al Volturno in AD 717.
In the 8th century, Monte Cassino evolved as a dual-focus entity by reoccupying the earlier buildings. Commanding the summit, sursum, was once more the small church of St John the Baptist. On the steep midslope below, the second component was pivoted around St Martin, occupying the ancient temple podium. The Tower of St Benedict was placed against the westernmost angle of this podium, and – if San Vincenzo al Volturno is a reliable guide – may have served in the 8th century not only as the abbot’s residence, but also perhaps as a dormitory for the community of monks. Other buildings either made in timber or with mortar made of clay, as at San Vincenzo al Volturno in the 8th century, were surely overlooked in Pantoni’s rescue excavations. In the absence of such traces, drawing again on the San Vincenzo evidence, Monte Cassino’s refectory would have been along the eastern perimeter of the temple podium. The refectory would have been a significant creation, following the reforms advocated by Bishop Chrodegang of Metz in the 760s, as he aimed to introduce greater collegiality and rigour within monastic life. At San Vincenzo al Volturno the first refectory was built in the 780s. If this occurred contemporaneously at Monte Cassino, Charlemagne may have dined here in AD 787 when he visited the shrine of the founder, as well as its illustrious intellectual Paul the Deacon.
San Vincenzo’s dedicated dormitory belongs to a slightly later date, when Abbot Joshua replanned the monastery in the 790s and early 800s. At Monte Cassino, it remains a matter of speculation whether such a dedicated monks’ dormitory replaced the accommodation in the Tower of St Benedict as early as the later 8th century. Yet given Monte Cassino’s status by the later 8th century, with its growing number of monks, such a development is plausible. As for the earliest burials at San Vincenzo al Volturno, block-built and simple graves belonging to an 8th-century cemetery were found beside the residential tower, not in a separate cemetery. From this century, the practice of effectively ‘living’ with the dead appears to have begun.
The Carolingian monastery
The monastery of Monte Cassino, in common with all major monasteries in the Carolingian Age, was substantially enlarged in the late 8th century and over the course of the earlier 9th century. It belonged to the Carolingian renaissance principally because of its close connection to the Carolingian court through Paul the Deacon. Under Abbot Gisulf (796-817), Monte Cassino assumed a new form: a polyfocal community, which according to Leo of Ostia comprised two parts, sursum on the summit, and deorsum at the foot of the mount. This lower monastery, the monasterium maius, was known by a Greek name as Eulogimenopolis, and lay where modern Cassino is located. On occasions, the hilltop monastery was likened to a castellum (fort) and the settlement at the foot of the hill was the civitas (city). Don Mariano Dell’Omo, the modern historian of Monte Cassino, contends that it was in this lower monastery that the administration of Monte Cassino’s growing territory was managed, now essentially amounting to a statelet, primarily acquired through gifts.
By the second quarter of the 9th century, this nucleus resembled the new ‘towns’ of Latium. In AD 883, when Eulogimenopolis was attacked by the Arabs, the lower settlement was enclosed within a defensive circuit. This circuit ringed three churches, to the north of which was an area designated for commercial activity. This lower enclave was presumably intended to be easily accessible for pilgrims, as well as a reference point for donors. It may have provided accommodation for the lay workforce that sustained the main monastery, too. Eulogimenopolis was a far grander version of the so-called borgo identified at San Vincenzo al Volturno, which occupied the east side of the river Volturno. In this latter case, the archaeological evidence shows the presence of post-built timber structures as well as the remains of glass- and pottery-production.
In this era, Monte Cassino’s hilltop basilica was refurbished by Abbot Gisulf. His objective was to imitate the restoration in Rome’s pilgrimage churches made by his contemporaries, Popes Hadrian and Leo, as opposed to a later ex novo investment that took place in Rome as of the papacy of Pascal I. The exact details of its plan can only be gauged approximately. A key element, of course, was its sanctuary church. Pantoni (in his reading of CMC) attributes to Gisulf the major remodelling of the little church of St John the Baptist and its rededication to St Benedict. The new church essentially incorporated the Late Antique one and effectively served as its chancel. This enlarged basilica was only 17m across and between 28m and 36m long. Hardly a grand building by contemporary standards, this aisled basilica appears to have skilfully used the constricted hilltop space available. The sanctuary was most probably not accompanied by a claustrum (cloister) at this time and stood largely in isolation. Pantoni believed it was a funerary church of sorts, close to which abbots were buried in the 9th and 10th centuries. That the church was extended westwards may imply that other important buildings lay immediately to the east (where perhaps the church of St Peter was situated). In size, Gisulf’s basilica now resembled San Vincenzo Minore with its fine ambulatory (of the 780s) at neighbouring San Vincenzo, as opposed to the large new basilica of San Vincenzo Maggiore consecrated in AD 808. If this is so, the St Benedict’s ‘chancel’ (the old church) served in the liturgy as the elegant ambulatory at San Vincenzo Minore had once done.
Was this constraint in amplifying St Benedict created by the existence of an elevated atrium terraced out over the slope immediately in front of Monte Cassino’s refurbished 9th-century basilica? Atria at this time were fashionable, being revivals of the Early Christian concept of an area designated for privileged burial. Let us examine this vexing question from several angles.
First, Pantoni’s excavations of the basilica of St Benedict offer some support for such an atrium. The discovery of a line of distinctive 9th-century tombs west of the basilica might well indicate the presence of an area on the western lip of the hill that was defined by an atrium, with this cemetery inside it. Further support for an atrium in front of the sanctuary church is to be found at Gisulf’s new basilica of St Saviour in his lower monastery at Eulogimenopolis. Beside the late-8th-century church of St Mary of the Five Towers built by Abbot Teodomar (777/778-796), Gisulf erected a large basilica, the church of St Saviour, known from a detailed plan and elevation made in 1733. Both this great building of the Carolingian age and St Mary were unfortunately destroyed in the battle in 1944. St Saviour measured 36m in length by 19m wide. In front of it, Leo of Ostia records a colonnaded atrium 17m by 17m, in the centre of which was a bell-tower. On the eastern side, facing the church, an altar was dedicated to St Michael.
Evidence for an atrium in front of St Benedict is also to be found at San Vincenzo al Volturno. Here, in the age of Abbot Joshua, Gisulf’s contemporary, an elevated atrium was created. Within it, similar to the line of tombs found in front of St Benedict by Pantoni, were rows of banked 9th-century tombs belonging to abbots and monks. These include the tomb of Abbot Talaricus (d. 823) confirming that the elevated grand atrium pre-dated AD 823. The painted inscription in Talaricus’ tomb read: EGO TALARICVS / [CR]EDO S(an)C(t)AM RESVRRECTIONE(M) (‘I, Talaricus, believe in the Holy Resurrection’).
The existence of a 9th-century atrium in front of St Benedict, associated with the proposed monumental porticus, is likely but must remain an open question. Its existence, however, would have determined the remodelling of the approach to St Benedict until Abbot Desiderius completely rebuilt it in 1066-1071.
The similarities between the works of the two Carolingian-era abbots, Gisulf and Joshua, do not finish here. At San Vincenzo al Volturno, a system of covered thoroughfares leading from the claustrum was constructed by Joshua (792-817), including a monumental staircase up to the elevated atrium. This San Vincenzo staircase doubled as a mausoleum and contained a major tomb, possibly of an abbot. Prominent burial in or close to passageways appears to have been a feature of these monasteries. A similar monumentalisation certainly occurred at Monte Cassino. Abbot Gisulf’s new monastery included a flight of steps inside a corridor leading up from the midslope terrace and St Martin below, expressly aggrandising the approach to the hilltop as a point of pilgrimage. A generation later, Abbot Apollinaris (d. 828) was buried next to this covered staircase. Gisulf’s porticus would appear to have imitated the long passageways in the Lateran palace at Rome and Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen. Certainly, the shrine of St Benedict attracted important visitors. These included Charlemagne in 787; Radelchis, Count of Conza, in c.817; Prince Siconulf of Salerno in 843; and Ludwig II in 866.
A key point in the new midslope arrangements at Monte Cassino is the Tower of St Bertharius (Bertharius died in 883). Towers of this kind, a feature of Late Antiquity as we have seen, were reintroduced to Italy in the mid-9th century. The tower belonging to the later 9th century was situated at the north-west angle of the old temple podium, at the point in all likelihood where the covered passageway began. We may presume that the tower replaced an earlier abbot’s palatium (palace), positioned (like the abbot’s house at San Vincenzo) close to the monastic thoroughfares, to meet lay visitors and donors, and to interact with the claustrum. As for Monte Cassino’s claustrum at this time, we can only presently presume that the refectory and dormitory remained close to St Martin. Whether there was space for their enlargement as well as for an ample kitchen and stores to service the community seems doubtful. At least one other church, St Stephen, is mentioned later by Leo of Ostia in the midslope monastery at this time. Adjacent to St Benedict’s tower (if it still existed in the 9th century) appears to be the church discovered by Don Giuseppe Quandel during his excavations in the late 19th century. Its location on the lower midslope girth suggests that St Stephen served as an entrance church.
It is likely that the 9th-century monastery comprised many more buildings that were destroyed by Early Modern structures. Were these on the summit, restricting the size of the principal basilica, or close to St Martin? The question remains open. What is certain, is that the next major phase of building works would be ushered in by a tragedy: the sacking of Monte Cassino in AD 883.
Richard Hodges is President Emeritus of the American University of Rome.
All images: courtesy of Richard Hodges, unless otherwise stated
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