Monastery of Saint Benedict - Sacro Speco

On March 5, 2012 Daniele brought me to the Saint Benedict Monastery of Sacro Speco.

This write-up and photos are from over a year ago, March 2012, but they never made it up. I'm trying to upload old pictures and the accompanying stories now with back dates so they are archived in order.

Saint Benedict Monastery of Sacro Speco

Our trip to Assisi seems to have reminded Daniele of the largely untapped “places to visit” the Catholic Church offers us here. We've visited a few exceptionally pretty churches, abbeys, and monasteries, but there are much more we still have yet to see.

Saint Benedict Monastery of Sacro Speco

The two largest orders of monks are of Saint Frances and Saint Benedict. Saint Frances, famously walked from Assisi to Rome. Saint Benedict prayed in a cave and had visions (to simplify things a bit). That very cave was turned into a monastery, which is not far from us in Rome. Benedictine monks also believe in a “work and pray” model which leads to awesome hand made goodies in their shops, like honey.

Monk on a cell phone

This monastery, Monastero San Benedetto - Sacro Speco, in the city of Subiaco, is very old with beautiful stuccoes on the walls. Like Assisi, and apparently any church, the older church is the lower level and they built on above it. Here the lower level showed its age with a fair amount of scratched in graffiti. People are animals.

Monastery of Saint Benedict - Sacro Speco : Stucco of Madonna Saint Gregory's Chapel in lower/older church covered in graffiti signatures

The amazing thing about this place, and what I really didn't expect, is the cave is there in its original form built right into the church. It is not covered in tiles or other wise refinished; it is a cave just in a church.

There is another Benedictine monastery below Sacro Speco, Monastery of Saint Scholastica. We took a tour of this one. They had a store so I bought some honey.

View from Monastery of Saint Benedict - Sacro Speco, including Monastery of Saint Scholastica (front left) and city of Subiaco (back right).

As a little bonus there are some Ancient Roman ruins just on the road to Sacro Speco. A villa of Nero. You find old villas of Nero everywhere you go around Rome; dude had a lot of houses.

The rest of the photos from this trip can be found here:
https://plus.google.com/photos/111221349198606775660/albums/5865687971036327841