Ring the Doorbell, Enter, Someone Will Welcome You

The Restoration of the Monastery of San Masseo in Assisi by the Bose Monastic Community

Abstract

Each place has a peculiar history and nature, attracting its morphological characteristics and the elements brought about by mankind. If that place is a monastery, we should also consider that indefinable presence, yet also tangible, made by the lives of men and women that have worked, prayed and hosted pilgrims there, year after year. Restoring the spaces of a monastery is difficult yet it also implies a great charm. It requires courage and freedom to remember that we are not alone, but we are accompanied by a big crowd of men and women who have lived there, year after year, to learn the arduous but wonderful art of living. Restoring a building is not merely a task of functional adaptation or modernization. It is a cultural exercise: listening to, understanding and finding the nature of that building, so that it can start a new life. Restoring is a prophetic task through which the built space can live its own life again, according to the forms, rhythms, and ways of those who will dwell there. Therefore the project cannot avoid to take a stance towards reality and society, towards the polis in which it is located. In the case of a religious building, it needs to take a stance towards its church. We studied ten years before starting our project – the restoration of the monastery of San Masseo (Assisi) – so that we could understand what the living stones were narrating, beyond abandonment, ruins and additions.