Pomposa Abbey, which can be seen today when travelling along the busy SS Romea coast road, is all that remains of an ancient and more complex abbey complex that was perhaps built as early as the 7th century AD on what was once an island, a hump emerging from the brackish waters within a triangle ideally bounded to the north by the Po di Goro, to the south by the Po di Volano and to the east by the Adriatic Sea. Next to it, smaller, was the wooded island of Volano, which must have hosted the first hermitic experiences.
The Insula Pomposiae was located along the via Popilia, from the Middle Ages called with the significant name of Romea, which was the road connecting north-eastern Europe with Rome, at the northern border of the ancient exarchate and close to the expansion areas of the Longobards.

The church of St. Mary is flanked by the imposing bell tower, of the cloister only the area defined on three sides by the southern side of the church itself and by the two buildings housing the chapter house, the refectory and the Museum survive. Beyond the green area, towards the west, there is the Palazzo della Ragione.
The buildings that have come down to us are the result of ancient collapses, additions and reconstructions, building and functional transformations and more recent restorations, and the successive building phases of the complex can be read through careful observation of the surviving structures and the excavation and restoration work carried out.
The fragments of a cocciopesto floor and the stucco elements of the presbytery enclosure, used to build up the floor below the floor level, seem to belong to an early church from the 6th-7th century AD, as wide as the present one but shorter, discovered during archaeological excavations in the second half of the 20th century.
And we must think that an initial building and religious community existed at that time if already in the year 874 Pope John VIII claimed the important monastery from the Church of Rome.

The historical, building and political events of Pomposa Abbey can be seen directly in the sequence of wall, floor and decorative structures, and in the reuse of architectural elements in various ways. In fact, the church of St. Mary’s presents non-uniform walls made up of sections variously connected with different building techniques and heterogeneous materials.
Between the 9th and 10th centuries, the church was enlarged by adding a new two-storey wall structure with cross vaults, supported by four central columns and supporting pilasters in the perimeter walls, whose outer walls were adorned with mullioned windows that gave light to the atrium. The church, decorated with frescoes, was a medium-sized building with three naves and seven arcades, with a polygonal apse outside and semicircular inside, and a covered atrium. The present back wall was the outer wall of the atrium.
A further enlargement took place in the first half of the 11th century, between 1026 and 1044, with the demolition of the back wall to incorporate the atrium, the construction of a new section of floor with innovative solutions and the erection of a new atrium – the present one, which today appears to have been modified by modern restorations – by magister Mazulo, mentioned in the epigraph next to the outer triforium.
The capitals and pulvinos appear different from each other and are dated between the 5th and 6th century or, more rarely, to the Roman period. These and other elements are generally considered to be of Ravenna origin, according to the practice, common in the territory of the exarchate, of bringing to Ravenna materials taken from abandoned ancient buildings and then redistributing them for use at related sites.
This phase of work coincided with a period of political and economic fortune for the Abbey, due also to the widespread reclamation of the territory, made necessary by the increase in the level of the surrounding waters in a period of humid climate: the uncultivated land on the coastal strips of the Insula and in the areas contiguous to the Goro and Volano riverbeds was assigned in level and emphyteusis (long-term contracts) with the clause ‘ad meliorandum‘, which involved individual practices of maintaining the drains and ditches, and this caused a revival of agriculture.

The bell tower was built at private expense to the north of the church, flush with the atrium façade wall, in 1063, as indicated by the epigraph walled into one side of the wall, in which the name of the master Deusdedit, who designed it, appears. It stands on a sturdy stepped plinth of large limestone blocks and only the brick spire crowning was built at a later date and its present appearance is the result of restoration work carried out in the 19th century.
The bell tower has nine tiers, separated by cornices and hanging arches. Up to the fourth level, the only openings are small single-lancet windows of increasing width, while the following orders have a mullioned window, two three-lancet windows and two four-lancet windows made of reused material.
In the walls of the bell tower there are 71 housings for ornamental ceramic basins (large bowls), placed mainly on the northern side to be visible to those arriving from Venice. There are only a few original ones, imported from Egypt, Tunisia and Sicily, which are also present on the façade of the atrium and partly preserved in the masonry and partly in the museum, while many of those visible were made in recent times by craftsmen from Faenza.

The mosaic floor in the raised area of the central nave of the church, made in various phases according to different artistic expressions, also refers to this phase.
Around 1150, under the direction of Prior Giovanni Vidor, other important renovations and refurbishments were carried out in the monastery, the church and its interior furnishings.

However, the crisis was approaching: with the Ficarolo routes and the shifting of the main course of the Po River further north, a new cusp began to form and water returned.
From the 13th century onwards, the Este family focused their expansionist aims on Pomposa, until they acquired direct dominion in the 15th century through the system of the commenda, and the decline began.
In 1553 the last monks moved to Ferrara and in 1663 the monastery was suppressed because of its state of abandonment and the church declared a parish.
We know that at that time it was still a vast complex with two cloisters, courtyards and service buildings, connecting loggias, vegetable gardens and gardens enclosed by boundary walls.
With Napoleon’s confiscation of ecclesiastical property in 1802, the monastery was auctioned off and bought by the Guiccioli family of Ravenna to become the site of warehouses and agricultural services.

The Pomposian Museum is housed in the building that delimits the cloister area to the south, in the room that was once the monks’ dormitory, and was established in 1976 as a place to safeguard the sculptural and architectural elements found by chance in the abbey area and its surroundings; today it also preserves material from restorations and archaeological excavations.
Among the latter, the three Etruscan marble tombstones from the 5th century B.C., the fragments of black-painted and red-figure ceramics, and the fragments of Roman amphorae from the 1st century A.D., which testify to the circulation of goods along the Po River and its branches in ancient times, are perhaps significant of earlier periods.

– Text and cover shot by Benedetta Bolognesi (tenacious cultural explorer) –