ABBAZIA DI GALGANO | THE MEDIEVAL RUINS

AIRVŪZ STAFF NOTE : Former Drone Video of the Week Winner Alessio Tricarico brings us this excellent drone video of a well-known monastery in the Tuscany region of western Italy. It's called the Abbey of San Galgano, and it's located in the province of Siena, in the southeastern part of Tuscany. The abbey was founded by the Order of Cistercians, an offshoot of the Order of St. Benedict. The monastery's main church, which is now roofless, was constructed in the 13th century. It's been inactive since the late 18th century.

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This unique place is San Galgano Abbey that, along with the hermitage of Montesiepi, rises in the valley of the river Merse, in the the Provinces of Siena to the border with the one of Grosseto, between the two medieval villages of Chiusdino and Monticiano.

In this territory marked by an abundant presence of beautiful hamlets, castles, churches and monasteries, also this fascinating Abbey can be admired: the Cistercian monastery is picturesquely located in the rural fields, simple and essential in style, clear in colour and immediately recognizable for its most remarkable characteristic: it’s completely roofless.

The abbey was built in the 1200s, a period of strong affirmation of the Order of Cistercians in Italy, when the Romanesque style was merging with the newborn Gothic style, and in a short time acquired extended properties (land, mills, farms etc.). According to Cistercian customs, a monastery had to be sited in isolation away from towns or villages, as the monks wished to follow a strict life of prayer and self-sufficiency with little contact with the outside world, on a plain sheltered by hills or mountains and by a river, in order to have all that was necessary for them to live and work within its walls. In fact, the place where the abbey was built, on a plain by the river Merse, must have appeared ideal to the monks at the time.

In the 1300s the decline started, due to the Black Death of 1348 that devastated Europe and decimated the monks in San Galgano. After this tremendous disaster, the definitive downfall was caused, as for many others abbeys, by the commenda (the imposition of an abbot from outside, in charge of the abbey’s s wealth and belongings): among the other misdeeds, one of the abbots even sold the lead from the roof, that then collapsed.

The lack of the roof, as well as that of the pavement, that in Spring is covered by grass, makes the Abbey even more evocative. The walls of the church are still fully intact and goes up towards the open sky: it’s a kind of magic to visit a church with the sky as roof and a meadow as pavement!