Sacro Speco site features

The monastery is built into the curve of an immense rock wall on Monte Taleo, above Subiaco and the river Aniene. It does not stand on the mountain so much as hang off it: nine tall arches, some of them pointed, carry the whole structure out from the cliff, and from below that arcade is the building's silhouette.

Inside

What is inside is a complicated labyrinth rather than a plan -- two churches set one above the other, and a great many small churches and chapels threading between them, several of them cut out of the rock. They follow the line of the cliff rather than any geometry, so the visit is a sequence of descents and turns with the level changing under you.

Almost every surface is frescoed, and the paintings are not of one date. The earliest are Byzantine work of the eighth century; then the portrait of Saint Francis; then the paintings of Magister Consolus in the thirteenth century; then the Sienese and Umbrian-Marchigian frescoes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that cover the upper church and other rooms. The most significant cycles are thirteenth- and fourteenth-century and are well preserved. Three subjects run through them: the Passion of Christ, the life of the Virgin, and the life of Benedict of Nursia. There is also a statue of Saint Benedict by Antonio Raggi of 1657.

The cave

The lower church holds the grotto itself -- the cave where Benedict spent his youth as a hermit, following the example of the anchorite fathers. It is the reason every other thing here exists, and the building has been arranged around it for fifteen hundred years.

Almost every surface is frescoed, and the paintings span a very long period: early Byzantine work of the eighth century; the portrait of Saint Francis of 1223, held to be the oldest faithful likeness of him, painted before he had been raised to the altars; the work of Magister Consolus in the thirteenth century; and the Sienese and Umbrian-Marchigian paintings that decorate the upper church and other rooms in the fourteenth and fifteenth. The most significant cycles are of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and are well preserved. Three subjects dominate: the Passion of Christ, the life of the Virgin and the life of Benedict. There is also a statue of Benedict by Antonio Raggi, of 1657.