Abbey of San Pietro in Aquara

The Benedictine abbey of San Pietro stood in the hamlet of the same name, halfway between Aquara and the Calore river, along the old royal road. Tradition attributes its founding, before the year 1000, to the Lombard king Desiderius. The village was devastated by the Saracens, by the troops of Frederick II in 1246 and by the 1456 earthquake, until the plague of 1556 emptied it completely.At the end of the 15th century the abbey was one of the largest farming estates in the Calore valley, with hundreds of reclaimed plots and dozens of tenant families. The church, a long rectangle with no side altars, was restored in 1512 and reduced by about two thirds in the 17th century, when the unstable façade was demolished. We like imagining it at the centre of that busy countryside.