Description

The Abbey of Sant`Eutizio is located in the municipality of Preci, in the Castoriana Valley.

When Eutizio died on May 23, 540, he was buried underneath the high altar of the ancient oratory dedicated to the Mother of God. The fame of his holiness spread quickly, along with that of the miracles he performed. Pilgrims from all over came to visit his tomb, and when the hair shirt he had worn was carried in procession, it brought the gift of rain, and continued to do so for centuries.

Eutizio, who in his old age wore the black scapular of the Benedictine order, was succeeded by Meliore, who died in 560 and also became a saint. For four centuries the eremitic life, following the Rule of Saint Benedict, was slowly transformed into the cenobitic life, going from the cave to the monastic cell and from the anchorite to the monk belonging to a community that, although secluded from the world, acted powerfully within the world.

In about the year 1000, the Abbey that had been built over the early oratory owned a fief that included the villages and castles located in the district, and its ecclesiastic jurisdiction extended as far as Ascoli and Teramo. In 989 Trasmondo, the Duke of Spoleto, took the monastery under his protection; in 996 the Emperor Otto granted his protection to the abbot and his monks, a privilege renewed by Conrad II, crowned in 1027. The tithes, paid in kind, brought wheat, olive oil, wine, wool, cheese and precious saffron to the abbey. Other villages, such as San Marco di Norcia and San Pietro di Acquaro, paid their dues with goods such as crockery and knives, while San Lorenzo di Canatro supplied the monks with glassware.

The intense flow of trade made the abbey rich and powerful until the end of the 12th century, when a period of decline began due to the rise in power of the Communes, to the conflicts between the Papacy and the Empire, and to the centralizing politics of the Church. In 1259 the monks ceded possession of the last remaining lands of the old fief to Norcia. The Benedictine monks had built a sort of church over Spes’s oratory that was restored and renovated in 1190 by the abbot Teodino I. The work was commissioned to a “Mastro Pietro” (perhaps a Roman marble worker), and it was completed by the next abbot, Teodino II, in 1236.

The façade is decorated with a large rose window over the portal with double arched lintel. The work of Teodino I is commemorated in Leonine verses in the lunette of the portal. The rose window, in the Spoleto Romanesque style, is surrounded by symbols of the four evangelists.

The inner part is divided into eight “petals,” and the outer part into sixteen: 8-8-8, the number of Christ tripled, signifying the extending of his power over the three worlds. The church has a single nave, with the presbytery located high up and reached by a steep stairs, restored in the early 1900s.

Below the church is a crypt with two naves, with vaults supported by great columns.

A ribbed vault rises over the presbytery. Hanging over the altar is a large cross by Nicolo da Siena (15th cent.). Behind the altar, the remains of Spes and Eutizio rest in an urn placed in a 16th-century aedicula. The polygonal apse (14th cent.) is decorated with large blind arches.

The campanile, set on the Sponga cliff, was built by the commendator abbot Giacomo Crescenzi in the early 1600s. Not far from apse there is a shadowy cave, alongside of which flows a trickle of water coming down from the hill.

Inside the abbey, visitors passing through a portal carved with the Agnus Dei so dear to the Benedictines are welcomed by the gurgling of water together with the cooing of turtle doves. The fountain is made from ancient stone panels, decorated with lozenges separated by three small columns.

The Benedictines were responsible for the creation of the famous library, whose precious illuminated manuscripts from the time of the abbot  Crescenzi and St. Phillip Neri were brought to the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome in 1595. Among the manuscripts preserved in the old library of the Abbey of St. Eutizio is one of the oldest documents in Vulgar Latin, a confession formula going back to the late 11th century.

The Benedictine monks also established the monastery’s pharmacy and founded the celebrated School of Surgery of Preci, whose first physicians were monks from the abbey: a document from 1089 attests to the death of Adamo, “deacon, monk and physician in the Benedictine order,” probably a monacus infìrmarius working in the monastery’s infirmary-hospital. From 1131 to 1215 four councils prohibited the monks from practicing medicine, and the local surgical school passed into the hands of lay physicians introduced to the medical arts by the monks. The monks continued, however, to prepare medicaments from the medicinal herbs growing abundantly in the woods. The practicing of medicine in the valley in the times of the Roman municipium of Nursia is documented by at least one epigraph that mentions a freedman, Serapione, who was a physician. The name of the Valle Castoriana could be derived from the ancient presence imitazioni rolexof a sect venerating the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, disciples of the centaur and master of medicine Chiron, together with the worship of the healing Saints Cosmas and Damian.

Visitors to the abbey can relive these experiences in the museum located on the ground floor, where a medieval herbalist’s shop is accurately reproduced and which has faithful copies of the surgical instruments used by the monks on display.