SANT’ANTIMO must be the most luminous Romanesque church in Italy. The Benedictine abbey may not have been founded, as was long believed, by Charlemagne, but is first recorded in 813. Set in a narrowing valley just west of the pilgrim route to Rome, the Via Francigena, that followed the ancient Via Cassia, the abbey became exceedingly rich in the early medieval period.
First seen across fields, the church with its beautiful apse and tall companile makes an indelible impression. Begun in 1117, it is built of travertine enriched with alabaster from nearby Castelnuovo. The west front is austere, the central door opening to the nave which is flanked by columns of varying size, with fine capitals; the finest of these, the second on the right, represents Daniel in the Lions’ Den. Particularly in the morning, the light draws us forwards. The presbytery is set within an ambulatory with three radiating chapels, a scheme implying a knowledge of the great abbey at Cluny. But there is no such precedent for the liberal use of alabaster, the translucence of which gives the ambulatory a magical quality. To the south is the sacristy, overlying the crypt of the earlier ninth-century church; opposite is a smaller cruciform space within the lower stage of the campanile.
Many early churches in Italy have been ruthlessly restored. This is not the case at Sant’Antimo, because the monastery fell into decline and was suppressed by that most civilized of popes, Pius II, in 1462. As a result neither the Renaissance nor the baroque left its mark, and little survives of the monastic buildings. So the great church stands in unintended isolation.
Sant’Antimo from the east.