The Abbey of Sant’Urbano, Hidden Beauty
A surprising photographic guide to discover a jewel of medieval Marche architecture. Evocative images are accompanied by stories that intertwine scientific research and popular traditions in a clear and concise style.
A journey into the secrets of a unique place, founded a thousand years ago by monks, which was the heart of the farming community and which today, in addition to hosting thousands of visitors, is at the center of an innovative rural development project.
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. The Abbey of Sant’Urbano has been the center of this landscape for a thousand years, 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 the memories of its inhabitants.
The primary beauty, the one that immediately appears to the eye, is conveyed 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 Abbey of Sant’Urbano: Stone Pages in the Valley of San Clemente”, whose value this book reinterprets in a popular form.
The reader is led 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 evidenced 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 related 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 the book invites you to undertake,the joy of vision merges with that of discovery. A joy that surprises the reader with every page, just as it surprises everyone who visits this place of secret beauty with every step.