Visit the Badia of Pattano
Visit the Badia of Pattano
The Badia of Pattano is the most integrally preserved Italo - Greek Monastery in Southern Italy.
The monumental complex of Badia di St. Maria in Pattano rises on the area of a Roman installation of the first imperial age, probably inhabited since the times of the Greek Elea.
Here you can see:
- The uncovered Church of St. Maria, built in the X-XI centuries;
- The astonishing Byzantine Bell Tower;
- The precious Church of St.Filadelfo, with ruins of a Roman thermal plant and marvellous Byzantine frescos;
- The structure of the ancient coenobium wih an oil-mill, the cellars of the monastery, a suggestive little cloister and several buildings and courtyards
You will find the monumental complex plunged in a sea of olives and citrus plantations; you will be fascinated by the ancient strengthened monastery- farm with its several signs of a past of prayer but also of fights against invaders and brigands. You will know the tenebrous crimes, the tragic or licentious episodes in Boccaccio’s style, the violence and arrogances perpetrated by the egumen Elia and his gang of soldiers.
The abbatial Church of St. Maria has a polygonal apse and two chapels. Pieces of frescos date back the church to the X-XI centuries, in spite of the actual Angioin imprint (XIV) century), wich recall the Churches of St. Eligio and St. Maria Donnaregina in Naples.
You will be surprised by the particularity of the Bell Tower, one of the most ancient and stylistically suggestive of Southern Italy with the first four levels of Byzantine style and ogival lancets of Islamic influence.
You can admire the most precious casket: the Church of St. Filadelfo, dedicated to the first egumen, Saint by people acclamation, with important Byzantine frescos of the X-XI centuries. You can also visit the ruins of a Roman thermal plant, probably pertaining to a rural villa of the first Imperial age, and the suggestive medieval burials with tens of skeletons in their original position. The wooden statue of St. Filadelfo, work of exceptional suggestion and probably unique for its antiquity (late X century), is provisionally preserved in the Diocesan Museum of Vallo della Lucania.