San Pietro

About

The church and monastery of San Pietro, which gave its name to the district of the same name in the city of Vicenza, were the main administrative center of the abbey of San Pietro until 1810. This was the oldest and most important Benedictine convent in the Vicenza area. The church became a parish church, while the former monastery is now a care home for the elderly.

The foundation of the church of San Pietro is very ancient. Finds have been made there (fragments of a sarcophagus, parts of foundations ) dating from the 7th to the 9th century but, although various interpretations have been given over the years, none of them can, due to their characteristics and location, indicate precisely when the church was built.

It has also been hypothesized that the name of the church's patron, St. Peter, could indicate the moment of opposition by the Roman Catholic Church to the occupation of the Arian Lombards, or the period of their conversion to Catholicism, but these are also suppositions.

Accepting the interpretation given by Domenico Bortolan, which is based on an inscription preserved in the church next to the altar of Our Lady of Sorrows, the Vicenza historian Giovanni Mantese states that the monastery could have been founded in the year 827, which doesn't exclude the possibility that the church already existed.

Taking into account what is known about rural churches from the first millennium - such as those of San Michele in Caldogno, Santa Maria in Favrega and San Zeno in Costabissara, San Martino near Ponte del Marchese and San Giorgio in Gogna in Vicenza - it can be assumed that the early church was a small, extremely simple rectangular building with no significant architectural elements, and a single apse.

This first monastery, probably Benedictine and for men only, had a difficult existence; almost certainly - like the other one of Saints Felix and Fortunatus - it suffered the raids of the Hungarians at the end of the 9th and beginning of the 10th centuries, and was perhaps destroyed. In any case it was on the point of ruin when, in 977, the privilege of bishop Rodolfo defined it as “almost annihilated and devoid of any monastic cult and divine office”. A privilege granted by bishop Astolfo in 1033 and a diploma of protection from emperor Henry the Lion in 1055 proved to be of little use.

There are different opinions about when it became a convent. According to Mantese it was already a convent in the first half of the 11th century, according to others it became one a few decades later.

As was the case for the Benedictines of San Felice, the bishops also assigned a considerable amount of land to the monastery of San Pietro as a fiefdom, extending throughout the Vicenza area. Among others, the vast Selva Mugla, in the area now comprised between the towns of Vivaro, Polegge and Cavazzale ; most of the territory east of the city, from Settecà to Casale, from Lerino to Grantorto and Rampazzo and up to Grumolo, later called “delle Abbadesse”.

Probably during the 11th century - but the period is not certain, given the scarcity of artifacts that have survived until today, mainly the perimeter walls and those of the facade - a second, larger church was built in place of the previous one. Considering the period of construction, it must have been a Romanesque-style building, with a taller central nave with windows that let in a lot of light, two lower side naves and a three-gabled façade.

Other churches also came under the monastery's authority, such as those of San Vitale and Sant'Andrea, also within the village of San Pietro, and the small church of San Pietro in Monte at the top of the route where, later, the Scalette of Monte Berico were built. This small church was ceded to the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1280.

However, after the year 1000, the immense patrimony was endangered by rural lords and small feudal lords who attempted to usurp the funds that the abbot of San Felice and the abbess of San Pietro had granted them. Since by this time even the bishop of Vicenza had lost almost all his power, the latter turned to the Germanic emperor; thus in 1048 Henry III signed a privilege in favor of the monastery of San Pietro - whose abbess had won the favor of the empress to obtain this privilege - and this act was later very useful for the defense of the monastery's patrimony.

With the Concordat of Worms, the long struggle for investitures ended, and the protection of the monastery of San Pietro passed under the auspices of the Pope; with a privilege of 1123, Callixtus II placed it under apostolic protection. The bishop of Vicenza, Lotario, promoted the restoration of the buildings and in 1136 confirmed all the privileges granted by his predecessors to the Benedictine nuns of San Pietro.

In the 13th century the Benedictine order began to decline, despite the attempts made by popes and bishops from Vicenza to restore the monasteries to their original fervor, attempts that however were not very successful. In 1254 Pope Innocent IV instructed the then bishop of Vicenza Manfredo dei Pii and Bartholomew of Breganze to visit the monastery of San Pietro, which had fallen into disciplinary decay and was plagued by heresy, to carry out a reform. This reform was not successful, so much so that in 1291 Pope Nicholas IV had to ask Bishop Pietro Saraceni to go personally to the monastery and reform it, and if this was not possible, to transfer the nuns elsewhere.

Later on the patrimony grew and diversified: in the 14th century the nuns also owned wool processing workshops and others for iron processing along the Bacchiglione river, a leather processing workshop in Piazza Biade in Vicenza and a furnace in Camisano.

However, the monastery remained active, retaining its numerous possessions, and in 1318 and 1335 respectively it received confirmation of the ancient privileges granted by its predecessors from Bishop Sperandio and the Franciscan Bishop Biagio da Leonessa; In reality these privileges were more formal than real, as the monastery's patrimony had been largely depleted and the abbesses were constantly involved in legal disputes. Fiore de' Porcastri, who came from a noble family in Vicenza, was the greatest abbess of San Pietro in the 14th century. Under the rule of the Della Scala family, the church's assets were further plundered, but the monastery of San Pietro managed to have its direct patronage by the Holy See renewed, first in 1375 by Pope Gregory XI and shortly after by Pope Urban VI ; at the end of the century, however, only 5 nuns lived in the monastery, two of whom were foreigners.

During the 15th century all the monastery's architecture was renovated: in 1427 reconstruction and embellishment work was carried out on the cloister, with the characteristic terracotta decorations and in the second half of the century the church was completely restructured - and reconsecrated in 1596; the ground level was raised, probably to better defend the building from flooding by the nearby Bacchiglione river, the central nave was lowered and the façade took on its current gabled shape, the interior was renovated where marble columns, adorned with elaborate capitals, were placed to support the mighty arches.

All the buildings were then renovated according to the late Gothic and neo-Renaissance styles of the time, thanks to the considerable funds that the nuns, almost all of whom then belonged to the city's aristocratic families, contributed to the monastery; during this period the previous works and existing tombstones were lost; today, only a few traces of these works remain.

The fifteenth century, however, had begun with a very degraded level of monastic life, also due to the mismanagement of the abbesses of the time, almost all of whom belonged to the city's aristocracy, who entered the convent not by vocation but by force, and were therefore led to exercise the prestige and power that came from their condition. Thus, in 1435, the Bishop of Vicenza, Francesco Malipiero, undertook a reform of the religious orders of the diocese, and in particular of the Benedictines, to which the nuns of San Pietro belonged; he deprived the abbess of her administrative powers, entrusting them to nuns elected every year, and then recognized the right of the chapter to elect the abbess every year. He also forbade any person of either sex, secular or religious, to enter the cloistered areas and ordered an iron grille to be placed in the visiting rooms; however, these provisions were not respected, and ten years later Pope Eugene IV, who confirmed the bishop's provisions with a papal edict, disapproved of the bad behavior of the nuns, which was the cause of the people's complaints. After this measure, the convent recovered considerably and the number of nuns increased; at the beginning of the following century there were almost fifty, and in 1524 there were 80, leading an exemplary religious life. This reform was similar to that of the male convent of San Felice and, as in that case, in 1499 San Pietro was incorporated into the Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua.

In 1520 Pope Leo X issued a bull against the illegitimate possessors and usurpers of the property of the nuns of San Pietro. Not only had the vast tracts of land in the suburb, Schio and other areas been tampered with, but even the ancient rights and privileges that the nuns had over the waters of the Bacchiglione were being challenged.

In 1560 the nuns of San Pietro had the Camarzo gate closed, an opening in the Scaliger walls that was located south of the monastery near the Bacchiglione.