This book is a guide to discovering the Abbey’s visible and secret beauty.
Arriving at the Abbey of Sant’Urbano (Apiro, MC) is greeted by an apparition: an unexpected encounter with beauty, nestled in the heart of a landscape that frames it. We are in the San Clemente Valley, the area with the highest density of abbey complexes from the year 1000 in the world. For a thousand years, the Abbey of Sant’Urbano has been the center of this landscape, a center whose charm is not limited to the perfection of its visible forms: behind the harmony of its spaces and decorations lie hidden meanings, preserved by the stones or passed down through people’s memories.
The primary beauty, the one that immediately appears to the eye, is conveyed to us by photography, capable of capturing, through light, the poetry and material concreteness of these spaces.
The second beauty, that of details and stories, emerges from folk tales and scientific studies, such as that of Ivan Rainini, author of the volume “L’Abbazia di Sant’Urbano. Pagine di pietra nella Valle di San Clemente”, di cui questo libro restituisce in forma divulgativa il valore. Pages of Stone in the Valley of San Clemente, whose value this book restores in a popular form.
The reader is accompanied on a guided journey to discover countless anecdotes: the reasons that convinced the monks to choose this valley to build their home, the structural transformations that occurred over the centuries and are testified to today by the stones and inscriptions, the symbolic use of light as a divine manifestation, the frescoes as a “Bible of the poor,” the stories linked to the more recent use of the site by sharecroppers, the Abbey’s connection with the local community, and the attractions that characterize the surrounding area. In the journey that the book invites us to undertake, the joy of vision merges with that of discovery. A joy that surprises the reader with every page, just as it surprises at every step anyone who visits this place of secret beauty.
