CORTONA | Must-see Places

The Abbey of Farneta

A few kilometres far from the city of Cortona, there is the beautiful and historical Abbey of Farneta. The church was built between the ninth and tenth century by the Benedictine monks, and it was dedicated to the Virgin Mary of the Assumption. The abbey was the “mother” of lots of other abbeys spread all over Italy. The first document, where the abbey is mentioned, dates back to the 1014. There is nothing left from the original convent part, but the church survived, even if after the departure of the monks, its dimension was heavily reduced. Today the abbey has got a Romanesque style, with only one aisle, three apses in the wall at the bottom and two apses that you can see in the heading of the transept. Originally it had the aspect of a basilica with three aisles. At the side of the entrance there are two granite columns, that come from Roman buildings. The part that has maintained its original aspect is the presbytery, over the precious and fascinating crypt. The structure resumes the sacellum of the early Christian cemeteries, with two side cells with a shamrock shape and one central cell with a four-leaf clover shape. Near the church and in the area of Farneta, during the 1960s, the priest of the abbey don Sante Felici, passionate about palaeontology and archaeology, found some fossil remains of mammoth and other animals from Pleistocene, some Etruscan urns and a Roman tomb. All these findings once were in the sacristy, today these are preserved in the primary school of Farneta.