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Trento
- La Badia di San Lorenzo
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a Trento 2008
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HISTORY
-
There is documentary evidence
that a church dedicated to San Lorenzo
existed in Trento at the turn of the first
millennium, although recent archeological
excavations have shown that a church
building stood on the site in the Early
Middle Ages. The current church was built
between
1166
and
1183, together
with a Benedictine abbey that
was founded as an offshoot of the Vallallta
abbey in the Bergamo province.The complex
was located in an agricultural area on the
right bank of the Adige River, which enabled
the monks to follow the rule dictated by its
founder Benedetto da
Norcia
and synthesized in the motto
ora
et labora
("pray and work"). The entire area, already
built up in the Roman era, was located
outside the city walls and
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connected to the city by a wooden bridge. Every year, a fair
was held on August 10 during the feast day of San Lorenzo.
In 1858, the Austrian government deviated the riverbed and
radically changed the ancient shape of the site, which is
now 'compressed' between the rail station and the bus
terminal. When the Benedictines moved to the church of St.
Apollinare in
1234,
the Abbey carne under the control of the
Dominican Order and ultimately hosted the famous theologian
and hagiologist Bartolomeo from Trento. After five centuries
of culture and spirituality, the monastery was suppressed in
1778 by order of the Prince Bishop Pietro
Vigilia Thun, who used it as a prison. In the 1800s, the
complex became a poorhouse, a lazaretto far cholera
patients, and finally a military depot, before eventually
falling into ruins. The monastery and cloister were totally
destroyed during the Fascist period, and the church
-
stripped of its furnishings
- was damaged by air raids during World War
II. It was restored after the war thanks to the efforts of
Father Eusebio Jori, reopened to religious services in
1955
as "Tempio Civico", i.e. the city-owned prime
catholic temple of Trento, and it has been administered by
Capuchins ever since. After being damaged by the great flood
of the Adige in
1966,
the church
underwent a new study, archeological investigation and
restoration campaign that was sponsored by the Town
Municipality and completed in 1998.
THE COUNCIL
- During the Council of Trento
(1545-1563), the monastery
of St. Lawrence hosted Imperial Ambassador
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and many Dominican theologians,
including Spanish ones such as Domingo de Soia from Segovia,
a professor in Salamanca, and Pedro de Soto from Cordova,
the confessor of Charles
V.
Several Portuguese delegates also lodged
there, such as Girolamo Oleastro de Zamula,
an envoy of the King of Portugal, and Bartolomé dos Martires,
the Archbishop of Braga, who was later to be beatified. In
the Abbey are buried the remains of Theologian Lodovico
Vannino de Teodoli from Forn, the Bishop of Bertinoro, who
died on January
11, 1563,
and Pedro de Soia, who died on Aprii 20 of
that
same
year.
Cliccando sulle immagini si ottengono le stesse ingrandite
ART - A
masterpiece of Medieval art, the church displays a rare
stylistic unity, partly caused by the demolitions,
strippings and reconstructions the building suffered aver
the past three centuries. The exterior, in pure Romanesque
style, is characterized by alternating bricks and white
stones
A
large three-light window in the centre of the
facade surmounts a splayed portal in a hut-shaped,
projecting prothyrum. The apse is regularly interrupted by
half-columns with sculpted capitals in anthropomorphic and
phytomorphic motifs, which support a series of
small
arches. The sloping roofs are topped by a
tiburium with an octagonal base. The bell tower features a
belfry with four two-light windows and small decorative
obelisks in white stone. It dates back to the first half of
the 17th Century and is one of the most characteristic
structures of its kind in the city. Recycled stone elements
fill
in the spaces at the base of the shaft. The
architectural complex (38 meters long and 14 meters wide)
shows similarities with Benedictine architecture in the
Veneto and Lombardy regions. It is no accident that the only
name record
that
has survived of all the people who worked on
the building is that of a "magister Lanfrancus de Bergomo"
(master Lanfranco from Bergamo), who is mentioned in a
document from
1177.
The interior clearly displays the transition
from Romanesque to Gothic design and is remarkable far its
balanced architectural lines, characterized by great
linearity. Particularly sober are the decorative elements,
such as the Corinthian capitals on the
pillars and the blunted cube-shaped capitals on the columns.
The interior space is subdivided into three broad naves and
a raised presbytery,
and
the central vault is subdivided into four bays interrupted
by a dome. After the
monastery
was abandoned, the splendid
altars from the Baroque period were dismantled and then
moved to other churches in the diocese. The current altars,
with a more simple design, are recent constructions. The
apsidal window depicting San Lorenzo and the lateral windows
with St. Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of Assisi are
the work of Remo Wolf. The sculptures of St. Ambrose and the
Virgin of Loreto are by sculptor Luigi Degasperi.
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