Monastero di San Marco alle Foci

Built against the rock above the narrow gorge called le Fauces, the monastery of San Marco is documented from a papal bull of 1188 and later belonged to the Celestine order of Pope Celestino V. Its rock-cut church and walls survive as ruins above the gorge.

Why it matters

Few monastic sites in the Marsica are documented this early. A bull of Pope Clement III dated 2 June 1188 already records a church here as the ecclesia Sanctae Mariae intra fauces, and the house later entered the orbit of the Celestines, the order founded by the hermit pope who is buried at Collemaggio in L'Aquila. The ruins link the early monastic history of the Sirente-Velino valleys with the network of Celestine houses that extended from Abruzzo across late medieval Italy.

What to notice

The complex runs for more than fifty metres along a rocky ledge overhanging the gorge, built in the rough medieval masonry known as opera incerta. At the entrance, a rectangular opening about 1.80 metres wide has no stone architrave and is defended on the left by an arciera, a splayed vertical arrow-slit; above the portal you can still see the seats of a window. Inside, two rooms communicate: one, probably an open portico towards the stream, served as a passage; the other, set against the living rock, keeps rectangular holes that once held the beams of the ceiling and of an upper floor, so the monastery probably rose on two levels. A dividing wall carries a doorway 1.60 metres wide and a recessed window niche. The church itself was cut into the rock, with an apse hollowed out of the stone, traces of fresco pigment on its walls and a raised step at the back that carried the vault.

Context and history

The documented sequence is unusually complete for a small mountain house. On 24 March 1278 Count Ruggero of the Berardi family granted the monks of San Marco the land on which to build the monastery. On 19 January 1293 the church of San Marco appears in a testament of the order of fra Pietro da Morrone, the future Celestine V, and by 1320 the house was dependent on the great Celestine basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L'Aquila. In 1392 Count Pietro II of Celano gave the Celestine friars his own palace near the church of Sant'Angelo, by the castle, to use as a new seat, and the mountain house declined. A record of 17 April 1685 shows the abbot of Rovere, Nicola Pietrantonio, asking the bishop of the Marsi to reopen a chapel for a procession attended by fra Bartolomeo da Trasacco, disciple, secretary and biographer of Celestine V, although no source proves that Celestine himself ever stayed here. In recent decades the CAI sub-section of Celano cleared and secured the remains. The municipality lists the ruins among its oldest religious sites.