The Monastery of San Nicolò L'arena
The Monastery of San Nicolò, The Arena, also known as the Monastery of the Benedictines, contains stories, far away in the centuries up to our days. Since the Monastery, a place important in the history of Catania, both for its strategic position, on what was the hill of Montevergine, both for the games of power that took place within its walls.
The Monastery of catania is, for its size, the second monastic complex of the european after that of Manfra in Portugal. Built in 1558, in today's piazza Dante, was once home to the benedictine community consists predominantly of secondogeniti of rich noble families, who had embraced the monastic life more for convenience than for vocation, but the Monastery in recent centuries it has seen passing from its walls very different from the monks.
In 1866, in fact, the benedictine monks were expelled and the place of prayer and culture became the first site of a barracks and then a school. Only in 1977, its history is changed again when returned to his rooms, cloisters and corridors, it was the Faculty of letters and philosophy of Catania University.
To enable students to live a better life, the monastery was called Giancarlo De Carlo lavorà to a restoration lit up to 2008.
So the underground, chosen by the monks, before the earthquake of 1693, for cooking and keep stocks, have become a library; the cloisters of the east and the west, which is also inspired by the Italian cinema, which now of students; the cardo and the decumanus were valued. The church, dedicated to San Nicolò, The Arena, and it hosts one of the organs most important that you are in the catholic churches, and u charming sundial that marks the marble in the solar time, is filled with the public several times a week also through cultural events that are held within.
THE tell the story of this place was Federico de Roberto, catanian writer who lived at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century and in his work of greater success, The Viceroy, told the life story of the family of Uzeda, that flowed next to the life of the Monastery, where he himself had spent part of his years attending high school and then working at the Biblioteca Ursino recupero then. De Roberto, merciless vis-à-vis monks, describes the Monastery com eliogo of continuous scandals, adding that "in the city, the kitchen of the benedictine monks had passed into the proverb,... all Of that stuff if it was so great, that it sent as a gift to the families of the Fathers and of the novice, and the waiters, by selling the leftovers, there ripigliavano day, when four and when you are tari each. From here is born the myth of the "balls as big as melons", but also "the cauldrons and grills were so big that you could not boil a leg of veal and roast a sword-fish?"
De Roberto, the Monastery has always been a place of great culture, precisely because its founders, the monks, were men whose fineness intellectual had no equal.
Thanks to the agreement with the association of Officine Culturali and his memorable guided tours, the Monastery is today one of the sites most popular tourist visitti in Catania.
Hours of guided tour
From Monday to Sunday from 9 to 17. For information, please contact Officine Culturali
info@officineculturali.net
095/7102767 - 334/9242464
