Sacra di San Michele

Interesting facts

The church stands on a 26-metre masonry base built up from the slope, and the bare summit rock of Mount Pirchiriano serves as one of its supporting pillars.

Visitors climb the Scalone dei Morti, the Staircase of the Dead, named for niches where skeletons of dead monks could be seen until fairly recent times.

At the top of the stairway stands the Zodiac Portal, carved in the 12th century with signs of the zodiac as a reminder of passing time.

Squeezed onto the peak, the church reverses the usual layout: its façade lies below the high altar, with the apses rising above it.

According to legend, the maiden Bell'Alda leapt from a tower to escape soldiers and was saved by angels, but died when she jumped again to prove it.

At Easter 1098 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, visited to see his nephew, a monk here who later became abbot of Bury St Edmunds in England.

By 1622, when Pope Gregory XV suppressed the abbey, only three monks remained, and it lay largely abandoned for almost two centuries.

The abbey lies on the medieval Way of Saint Michael, a pilgrim route linking Mont-Saint-Michel in France with Monte Sant'Angelo in southern Italy.

A regional law formally designates the Sacra as the symbolic monument of the Piedmont region.

Shooting Jean-Jacques Annaud's film of The Name of the Rose here was considered, but the producers dropped the idea because of the cost.

Why it is worth it

Local tradition credits the sanctuary's origin to a vision: Giovanni Vincenzo, a hermit who had once served as archbishop of Ravenna, is said to have been commanded by the Archangel Michael to build a shrine on the summit of Mount Pirchiriano, and the legend adds — perhaps to explain away how quickly it was finished — that angels themselves helped consecrate it. Strip away the miracle and the construction still dates to a genuinely early period: the abbey was built between roughly 983 and 987, perched on a rock spur nearly a thousand meters up, in a position that made it as much fortress as monastery.

Its position on a pilgrim route linking France and Rome brought both traffic and money for centuries, but its most striking role came much later, in 1836, when the House of Savoy — already one of Europe's oldest ruling dynasties — moved the remains of several of its members here from Turin Cathedral, turning the mountain abbey into a royal mausoleum.

The abbey's steep, stacked, labyrinthine architecture also gave Umberto Eco the physical model for the monastery at the center of "The Name of the Rose." Eco never names Sacra di San Michele in the novel — he relocates his fictional abbey to an unspecified spot in the Apennines — but by his own account it was a visit here that supplied the sense of vertical, claustrophobic stone he needed for the setting, right down to the idea of a library built like a maze.

Good to know

The abbey draws roughly 91,000 visitors a year, climbing several hundred steps and a monumental staircase past the Savoy tombs to reach the church at the summit.

Getting there

15 km from Piossasco. Turin Airport (TRN) is about 27 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

The Sacra di San Michele, sometimes known as Saint Michael's Abbey, is a religious complex on Mount Pirchiriano, on the south side of the Val di Susa in the municipality of Sant'Ambrogio di Torino, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, Piedmont region of northwest Italy. The abbey, which for much of its history was under Benedictine rule, is now entrusted to the Rosminians.

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