The Ruins and their Surroundings

  
 
From 1970 until 1973 an international team of archaeologists and historians sponsored by the British School of Rome (a post-graduate school) in collaboration with the “Sovrintendenza alle Belle Arti” organised excavations and historical research. Copies of the resultant publications are in the library. The next 20 years were spent, not in restoration, but in the conservation and landscaping of the magnificent ruins.





  
  In collaboration with Dario Fo, Italy’s Nobel Prize winner for literature, a wooden stage was constructed, with dressing rooms below, to facilitate the presentation of concerts and plays to invited audiences of up
to 300 guests.

Dario’s unexpected familiarity with both the history of the Church and mediaeval architecture allowed him to use the crypt to give an impromptu lecture on the association of the Abbadia with St.Francis of Assisi. 		 
 








By 1970 only those walls higher than 3 metres were still visible amongst the tons of rubble left by sixty years of plunder by local peasants seeking shaped stones for building their own homes.

The removal
of this rubble,
under the direction
of the archaeologists, finally revealed the original form
of the monastery in
the eleventh century.