Abbey of Sant’Elena sull’Esino

Near the confluence of the Esinante with the Esino stream lie the remains of the abbey of Sant’Elena (named “Sant’Elena dell’Esino” in the most ancient documents). Historians attribute the foundation of the first monastery to St. Romuald around 1009-1010, even though the abbey is first mentioned in documents in 1130; in 1180 it became the property of the Camaldolese congregation. Another papal document of 1199, along with privileges and exemptions, also listed its possessions (42 churches, some castles and villages, cultivated lands, woods, mills, houses and palaces), revealing the remarkable importance of this religious institution. What remains of that period, which saw successive rebuilding works throughout the entire 12th century, can be identified, again according to scholars, in the present church building and in the massive quadrangular defence tower. It was precisely the 12th-century works that gave the church its present single-apse layout, with two double-splayed windows and a three-aisled basilican plan with a crypt (rebuilt after a collapse in 1925), as well as all the sculptural decoration preserved inside and on the portal. The complete raising of the upper parts of the building is generally attributed to 1180, the work, indeed, of the new owners, the monks of Camaldoli. The rooms, once used for the various monastic functions, are now occupied by a restaurant; they have brick vaults and stone walls. The oldest monastic room, thought to date back to the 11th century, is a hall with “a barrel vault and a floor made of large blocks of stone”, and this part is perhaps precisely what remains of the original settlement of the abbey. Built of dark local stone, the church is east-oriented and ends in a single large apse (see photo apse) . The exterior has no particular decorative motifs. Only the base of the apse might belong to a different building phase from the elevation. In the apse the old construction seems to reach a height of about 2.5 metres, while the rest appears to be later work. The masonry of the north side is uniform in construction up to a height of about 4 metres, with well-squared stones set between layers of mortar about one centimetre thick, while the windows, four tall and narrow single lancets framed in white stone and terracotta, seem to have been made later. In the apse area, on the end wall of the south aisle, above the single lancet, some decorated stones are set into the wall, two with star-shaped geometric motifs and one with a cross and two men (see photo single lancet) . Above the apse there are also some terracotta tiles set into the wall (only one is of stone), decorated with geometric and floral motifs. The north side of the church (see photo outside) , measures 33 paces from the façade to the corner, while the apse adds 3 paces to the perimeter; the width of the building is 21 paces. More recent buildings lean against the south side of the church (now in private use). The three-aisled interior, unlike the bare and linear exterior north side, displays several decorative motifs. The monastery is entered through a door opening onto a small inner courtyard enclosed by high walls (note also the remains, on the outer perimeter wall, of what was probably a fortified gate overlooking the main road), above which rises the church façade, with a bell-gable and two openings of different sizes for the bells, and a large central round-arched window with a double cornice, set between two buttresses. The entrance to the church is on the left side of the inner courtyard. The church portal (see photo portal) is pointed, with four splayed cornices, carved and decorated: starting from the outside, two half-columns support an arch decorated with dentils (of particular interest is the left corbel, carved with plant motifs and, in the centre, the head of a man with a beard, a moustache and long hair); the second cornice, a half-column without decoration, rests on a corbel adorned with plant motifs; the third cornice, rounded, is supported by small corbels carved with eagles; the last cornice, the innermost, is decorated with vine-branch motifs; remarkable, if it is original, is the lintel: a white monolithic block carved in high relief with two animals facing each other, their heads turned towards their tails, licking themselves, separated by a tapering cross (the high relief is well executed, but the carving is flat and lacks detail, unlike the plant decoration of the cornices). The outer dentilled cornice of the portal continues horizontally along the façade: northwards as far as the buttress and southwards as far as the junction with the monastery building. The interior is very uniform up to the chancel area. There is no decoration except for the capitals of the cruciform pillars, which are well executed. These compound pillars have half-columns supporting the arches dividing the nave from the aisles. The church is covered with groin vaults. continued >>>