Abbazia San Pietro in Valle

Abbazia San Pietro in Valle sits halfway up Mount Solenne, in forest above Ferentillo in Umbria’s Valnerina. A Lombard duke of Spoleto founded it as a Benedictine monastery in the 8th century, and the church still holds a twelfth-century Romanesque fresco cycle, Roman sarcophagi and a high altar signed by its sculptor. Two cloisters lie behind it, the larger a double loggia built around a first-century BC altar.

What gives Abbazia San Pietro in Valle its character is that almost nothing in it has been smoothed over. The fresco plaster is broken where it is broken, the brick floors are worn into their herringbone, and the rooms the monks built are still doing recognisable work: the refectory serves breakfast under its barrel vault and original pink stone floor, the chapter house holds a billiard table, the abbot’s apartment is a reading room. Privately owned since 1917 and run as a small hotel, it puts guests inside the monastery rather than beside it. As a wedding venue in Umbria, Abbazia San Pietro in Valle reads as austere, intact and genuinely remote, with a valley road rather than a gate between it and everything else.