The Abbey of San Benedetto Martyr

The corpse of the Patron Saint, found on the shore 4 miles southwards to the town of Cupra Marittima, was transported by a peasant on the facing hill and put in a tomb created in the wood. After a while, following Costantin's edict in 313, around that tomb some believers built a chapel; until the seventeenth century there are few news about the church. Today there exist very little remains of that grave and almost nothing about the old building (except the eastern wall). Martyr St. Benedict's Abbey was reconstructed and widened between 1775 and 1778 under abbé Pasquale De Signoribus and on that occasion some beautiful and unique fourteenth and fifteenth century Flemish frescoes concerning the Saint's passion were lost forever.

The Abbey presents a brick wall structure in Neoclassic style, with a regular basis, an apse at North and a bell-tower on the Eastern side. The Second World War bombardments almost completely destroyed the apse; only recently an accurate restoration has brought some pre-existing frescos to light. Inside the church various other works, among which finds, epigraphs and stones are preserved: an altar-piece dating back to 1707 by the painter Ubaldo Ricci from Fermo on the Last Supper; a piece on the Virgin of Rosary by anonymous of sixteenth century and a Virgin of Carmelo, by anonymous as well, of the eighteenth century; moreover a simulacrum of the Immaculate Conception (to which the people from Sambenedetto are particularly devoted to due to the Virgin's intercession during the waves of cholera) created by a skilled artist from Mogliano in 1856, a Dead Christ dating to the second half of the eighteenth century and above all an altar dedicated to San Benedetto hosting his relics.