Abbey of Monte Cassino

History

The history of Monte Cassino is linked to the nearby town of Cassino which was first settled in the fifth century BC by the Volsci people who held much of central Italy. It was they who first built a citadel on the summit of Monte Cassino. The Volsci in the area were defeated by the Romans in 312 BC. The Romans named the settlement Casinum and built a temple to Apollo at the citadel. Modern excavations have found no remains of the temple, but monumental remains of an amphitheatre, a theatre, and a mausoleum show the wealth of the Roman town.

Generations after the Roman Empire adopted Christianity the town became the seat of a bishopric in the fifth century AD. Lacking strong defences the area was subject to barbarian attack and became abandoned and neglected with only a few struggling inhabitants holding out.

According to Gregory the Great's hagiography of Benedict, the Life of Saint Benedict of Nursia, the monastery was constructed on an older pagan site, a temple of Apollo that crowned the hill. The biography records that the area was still largely pagan at the time; Benedict's first act was to smash the sculpture of Apollo and destroy the altar. He then reused the temple, dedicating it to Saint Martin, and built another chapel on the site of the altar dedicated to Saint John the Baptist.

Pope Gregory I's account of Benedict's seizure of Monte Cassino:

Now the citadel called Casinum is located on the side of a high mountain. The mountain shelters this citadel on a broad bench. Then it rises three miles above it as if its peak tended toward heaven. There was an ancient temple there in which Apollo used to be worshipped according to the old pagan rite by the foolish local farmers. Around it had grown up a grove dedicated to demon worship, where even at that time a wild crowd still devoted themselves to unholy sacrifices. When [Benedict] the man of God arrived, he smashed the idol, overturned the altar and cut down the grove of trees. He built a chapel dedicated to St. Martin in the temple of Apollo and another to St. John where the altar of Apollo had stood. And he summoned the people of the district to the faith by his unceasing preaching. …

Treasures

In December 1943, some 1,400 irreplaceable manuscript codices, chiefly patristic and historical, in addition to a vast number of documents relating to the history of the abbey and the collections of the Keats–Shelley Memorial House in Rome, had been sent to the abbey archives for safekeeping. German officers Lt. Col. Julius Schlegel (a Roman Catholic) and Capt. Maximilian Becker (a Protestant), both from the Panzer-Division Hermann Göring, had them transferred to the Vatican at the beginning of the battle.

Another account, however, from revisionist author Franz Kurowski's The History of the Fallschirmpanzerkorps Hermann Göring: Soldiers of the Reichsmarschall, notes that 120 trucks were loaded with monastic assets and art which had been stored there for safekeeping. Robert Edsel (2006), on the other hand, speculates it might have been looting. The trucks were loaded and left in October 1943, and only "strenuous" protests resulted in their delivery to the Vatican, minus the 15 cases which contained the property of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. Edsel goes on to note that these cases had been delivered to Göring in December 1943, for "his birthday". This is, however, unproven.