Tomorrow, Tuesday 30 April, on the sidelines of the celebration for Saint Anselm the Abbot, founder of the Benedictine abbey and co-cathedral of the archdiocese of Modena-Nonantola, the “Guide to the Abbey and the Diocesan Museum of Nonantola” will be presented, edited by Simona Roversi and Jacopo Ferrari, director and curator of the Museum respectively. The presentation will be held in the abbey basilica at the end of the solemn concelebration at 6.30 pm, which will begin after the chapter vespers at 6 pm. The mass will be presided over by Archbishop Erio Castellucci and concelebrated by the canons of the abbey chapter.
The guide – it is explained in a note – is the result of a collective effort, which goes from the introduction edited by Msgr. Castellucci in collaboration with the art historian and medievalist Giovanna Caselgrandi and the architect Vincenzo Vandelli.
The volume – writes the archbishop in the introduction – “will certainly help readers, visitors and pilgrims to enter Christian art on the right foot, with an open mind, a heart warmed by beauty”.
It is – explains Simona Roversi – “an agile volume, useful to the many visitors and tourists who annually go to Nonantola to admire the thousand-year-old Abbey of San Silvestro and the art treasures exhibited in the nearby Museum, but not only”. “The objective – she underlines – is also to ‘take stock’ of the most recent scholarly research regarding the monastery and the cultural heritage still preserved. The topics are treated with scientific rigor and verification of sources, but with a popular language understandable to all”.
The book is divided into three parts. The first is dedicated to the 1,270 years of history of the abbey while the second offers an itinerary that starts from the portal on the facade to reach the apses – encountering works of art, curiosities and unpublished news -. Finally, the third part concerns the abbey heritage and the Benedictine and diocesan museum of sacred art, told, for the first time, room by room. We therefore range from the works coming from the archdiocese to the abbey section with the parchments of Charlemagne and Matilda of Canossa, the reliquaries, the staurotecas and the early medieval textiles of the Sacred Treasure, the illuminated manuscripts, the Polyptych.
