ABBEY OF POMPOSA
History and territory
A landscape of desert lowlands interrupted by stretches of water only seemingly stagnating, in reality throbbing with life.
It's a thick network of canals and rivers flowing slowly and gently, but always ready to star in terrible events that give back to water the lands that were so laboriously reclaimed.
Nowadays it's the Romea road joining Venice and Ravenna that runs through the PO delta; in the past it was the POPILIA, the ancient way of the pilgrims that put Rome in communication with Eastern Europe.
It was along this way, in the seventh century, perhaps already in the sixth that POMPOSA rose. It was the abbey built by the Benedictine monks moving from CASSINO to evangelize Europe. The choice of the place where to build the monastery was a happy one.
It's an island, the Pomposiana island, delimited by the sea and two rivers, the PO di Goro and the Po di Volano, which lend the place a healthy climate and favour inland communications.
In Pomposa the followers of Benedict were dedicated to prayer, study, meditation and work, activities recalled in the famous saying 'ORA ET LABORA'. The silence surrounding Pomposa was interrupted only in 874 by a letter from Pope John VIII mentioning St. Mary of Pomposa. Rich evidence will follow, documenting the greatness of the monastery during the centuries, regarded as the most outstanding one in Italy during the abbacy of St. Guido, in the first decades of the year one thousand… MONASTERIUM IN ITALIA PRIMUM. But the Po that made it a happy island also determined its fall. Floods and growing swampiness will lead to the slow but inexorable fall of the abbey, which terminated with the final dismissing of the monks in 1671. In the last decades, Pomposa has been the object of care and restoration, and now shows itself to the world once again with the imposing evidence of its past.