Abbey of Santa Scolastica site features

The abbey sits at 510 m east of Subiaco, stretched lengthwise along a valley that centuries of hermits and monks earned the name valle santa. You enter through the newest part and walk backwards through the architecture.

The Renaissance cloister comes first, arches on heavy piers, its west range rebuilt after the 1944 bombing. Beyond it the Gothic cloister is the strange one: six sides, two mismatched rectangles, pointed arches, and a hexagonal well at the centre standing on marble columns from Nero's villa. Look for the fresco of the Miracle of the Sickle in the southern gallery, where the entrance may once have been, and the carved slab opposite the church door with two deer drinking from a vessel. From the third and fourth arches of the west walk you can see the campanile with Monte Francolano behind it.

The Cosmati cloister is the oldest and the best. Romanesque arches on colonnettes -- paired, single, twisted -- every capital different, all of them white Carrara marble taken from the ruined monastery of San Clemente. The signature of Jacopo il Vecchio is cut into the archivolt on the south side. Hunt for the devil's face on one small column and the inverted human head on another.

The church above is neoclassical inside, a single nave under a barrel vault on a Latin-cross plan, almost trapezoidal in shape, decorated at Quarenghi's 1769 restoration after Palladio's Redentore. The transept still holds the rose window of the Gothic church of 1300. Outside, the five-storey campanile of 1052-53 is the oldest thing standing.

Nineteen monks live across the two Subiaco houses -- most here, a few at the Sacro Speco. A foresteria attached to the monastery takes guests in rooms for one to five people and has several dining rooms.

Three cloisters stand side by side here, running backwards in time as you walk in, with the church and its campanile above them.

• The Cosmati cloister -- signed Magister Jacobus Romanus fecit hoc opus, begun before about 1210 and finished around 1240 by Cosma, the craftsman the Cosmatesque style is named after.
• The devil's face and the inverted head -- two carvings on the twisted colonnettes of that cloister.
• The Gothic cloister -- six-sided and deliberately irregular, with pointed double-splayed arches on heavy piers.
• The hexagonal well -- at the centre of the Gothic cloister, its parapet standing on marble columns from Nero's villa.
• The flamboyant arch -- a large double arch of the 1400s framing the Gothic church front and the Romanesque campanile together.
• The Renaissance cloister -- begun 1580, finished 1689, its west range rebuilt after the bombing of 23 May 1944.
• The campanile -- five storeys, raised in 1052-53 by the French abbot Umberto on older foundations.
• The Gothic rose window -- surviving in the transept from the rebuilding of 1300.
• Quarenghi's interior -- the 1769 neoclassical recasting, modelled on Palladio's Redentore at the Giudecca.
• The deer slab -- a eucharistic emblem of two deer drinking, walled into a pier opposite the church portal.
• The site of Benedict's first oratory -- under the church, its traces found in 1962.