Abbey of Montecassino site features

Montecassino stands on a rocky hill about 130 km south-east of Rome, in the Latin Valley, on the site of the Roman town of Casinum -- and before that a Volscian citadel. What that means for a visitor is that the building is the top of a mountain: it is approached from below, it overlooks Highway 6 and the road to Rome, and the reason armies have fought over it for fifteen hundred years is visible from its own terraces.

What you are looking at

The abbey as it stands is a postwar reconstruction, rebuilt after the bombing of 1944 and consecrated on 24 October 1964. What survives from earlier is mostly underneath and beside it. Excavations after the 1944 destruction found traces of the oratories Benedict built -- Saint Martin's, set inside the pagan temple itself and measuring only 12 metres by 8, and St John the Baptist's on the mountain top where the open-air altar had stood, the same width and somewhat longer at 15.25 metres -- with additions of the eighth and eleventh centuries and their pre-Christian cellars.

The small size of that first oratory is the most eloquent thing on the site: twelve metres by eight, which implies a community of very few.

The museum

Two fragments of mosaic survive showing greyhounds, now in the Monte Cassino Museum -- all that remains of the apse, arch and vestibule decorated by Byzantine mosaicists whom Abbot Desiderius sent to Constantinople to hire some time after 1066. Contemporaries admired the work; everything else of it was destroyed in later centuries.

The site of Benedict's first oratories

Found in excavations after the destruction of 1944: Saint Martin's, built inside the temple of Apollo itself, 12 metres by 8; and St John the Baptist's on the mountain top where the pagan altar had stood in the open air, the same width and 15.25 metres long. Both carry additions of the eighth and eleventh centuries and sit over pre-Christian cellars. Benedict died in the oratory of St Martin and was buried in the oratory of St John.

The greyhound mosaics

Two fragments in the abbey museum, and the only surviving trace of the Byzantine mosaic decoration Abbot Desiderius commissioned after 1066, having sent envoys to Constantinople to hire the craftsmen. Leo of Ostia records that the Greek artists decorated the apse, the arch and the vestibule of the basilica, and that Desiderius had a great number of the monastery's young monks taught the technique -- which is how mosaic came back into medieval Italy.

The basilica

Consecrated by Paul VI on 24 October 1964, the fifth church on the site. Its predecessor, rebuilt with great magnificence under Desiderius with artists brought from Amalfi, Lombardy and Constantinople, was consecrated by Alexander II in 1071.

The tombs

Benedict and his sister Scholastica are buried here, along with Pope Victor III -- Desiderius himself -- the abbots Apollinaris and Bertharius, Carloman the mayor of the palace, Sigelgaita of Salerno, and Władysław Anders with members of the Polish 2nd Army Corps who took the ruins in 1944.

The view over Highway 6

Not a built feature, but the reason for everything that happened here. The abbey overlooks the road to Rome, which is why the Gustav Line ran through Cassino and why every commander in the field treated the monastery as a key observation post.