The abbey of the Three Fountains owes its name to the legend that has it that Saint Paul was beheaded in this place and that his head, severed from the neck, bounced three times and that, at each impact on the ground, he miraculously had a source of water, remembered by the three current churches. The abbey complex is located in a locality called Aquae Salviae; it is believed that the toponym combines the mention of the springs in the area with the name of the family that owned the estate in the late Latin period.
Immediately there is the clear sensation of an immersion in the past, a return to the medieval age, so much is the charm and mystery that this place manages to convey. At the end of the street you reach an open space where the entrance to the monastic complex stands, consisting of a series of three arches, the central of which is in marble. The structure was built at the time of Honorius III (13th century) and was part of a defensive wall, as can be deduced from the presence of hinges on the uprights of the marble arch with the evident purpose of supporting a very heavy door.
The portal is called the Arch of Charlemagne because the frescoes inside recalled the alleged donation of the possessions of Maremma from which the institution's wealth was born: according to legend, Pope Leo III had the relic of Saint Anastasius brought to the rescue of Charles Magno engaged in removing Ansedonia from the Lombards; the walls collapsed due to an earthquake, Charlemagne won his war, and the monastery was endowed with large possessions in Maremma.
The buildings of the abbey and the cloister are placed on the left of the church. Since the monks live in seclusion, the interior is rarely open to visitors. The abbey church of Saints Anastasio and Vincenzo has remained practically intact in the form in which it was built in the 12th century and represents the main church of the complex.
The portico, dating from the early 13th century, features marble columns and Ionic capitals.
The Cistercian hand - whose work completely submerged the remains of the primitive construction - is recognizable in the solid, severe and bare style of the church and other convent buildings, and in the fact that everything is built, in Lombard use, in brick, almost without resorting to bare materials, as opposed to the Roman usage of the time.
The only decorations consist of large figures of the apostles represented on the pillars of the nave, which Armellini reports that:
"they were painted with Raphael's cartoons and it is also claimed that they are copies of those very famous paintings by Sanzio in the Vatican in the so-called chiaroscuro room." After a short and shady path you arrive at the oldest church, the Church of San Paolo alle Tre Fontane.
The church stands on the place, formerly called ad aquas salvias, where, according to tradition, St. Paul suffered martyrdom by beheading: the legend says that his head, once cut, bounced three times on the ground, causing each I jumped a spring of water, one hot, one warm and one cold; hence the name of the toponym of the three fountains. This first church was completely rebuilt in the 16th century by Giacomo della Porta, between 1599 and 1601, at the behest of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini.
You enter inside after a small vestibule, where a cosmatesque mosaic from the early Middle Ages is preserved, which belonged to the previous church, and was found during the nineteenth-century restorations. The interior has a very simple plan with a single transverse nave, with two side chapels, along which three niches house the three fountains (from which, however, the water no longer flows since 1950): these three fountains are placed on three different levels as evidence of the ancient slope of the place.
These so-called fountains are made in the shape of a niche, with columns of black porphyry, and are surmounted by a shell-shaped basin above which there is a marble head of the holy apostle. In December 1997, the two marble heads of St. Paul, which had been stolen by unknown persons some years earlier, were found in a Tuscan collector and returned by Vittorio Sgarbi to the monks of the Abbey.
Near the first fountain is the column where, according to tradition, Paul was bound for beheading. Originally the stone base was also present in the church where, according to tradition, the saint was beheaded, but the relic was donated in 1818 by Pope Pius VIII to the Collegiate Church of San Paolo Naufrago in Valletta. The church was restored under Pius IX in 1867. On this occasion a large 2nd century polychrome mosaic with images of the Four Seasons was placed, coming from the imperial mithraeum of Ostia.
Original music by Savfk ( / savfkmusic savfkmusic)
Filmed with SONY RX10M3 in 4K.
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