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The former monastery near Massa Fermana called the Convento di San Francesco was originally founded in 1215 by St Francis, who personally chose its position on an isolated hill separate from but in sight of the small town of Massa Fermana. The monastery was closed in the 1890s, for reasons I was not able to discover, and the property passed to the village. During the last war, I was told, the buildings were used to house refugees from the fighting and the church continued to be used until the 1950s. The property is now empty and boarded up, but if you enter (which you shouldn’t) it has that remarkable sense of distressed beauty common to so many abandoned buildings. There is a peculiar sadness to seeing such a beautiful building, one of whose key purposes was to represent continuity of shared beliefs and values falling into decay. The building itself seems determined to transmit memories of what it was and who was there. [...]
Via Mariano Pallottini
