Subiaco Culture

Subiaco's culture is monastic at its root and industrial on top of it, which is an unusual combination for a mountain town.

The Benedictine presence is not a museum arrangement: Santa Scolastica is the Protocenobio of the Sublacense Congregation, the oldest Benedictine house still standing, and the valley is understood locally as the place where the order began rather than as a place the order happens to be.

Printing is the town's other claim. The press Sweynheym and Pannartz installed in the abbey in 1465 made Subiaco the first printing town in Italy, and the library at Santa Scolastica still holds incunabula from those years alongside its manuscripts and parchments.

Paper followed printing. The Aniene powered paper mills, and the town keeps a civic museum of papermaking and printing in the abbatial rocca, with a workshop reconstructing the hand-made cycle as the eighteenth-century mills ran it.

There is a local dialect, sublacense, in which the town's own name is Subiàcu.

And there is a quieter modern thread: the actress Gina Lollobrigida was born here, and her birthplace is pointed out in the old town.