A Walk around the Abbey Church
of S. Michele di Limigiano

The Umbrian hamlet of Limigiano, a frazione of Bevagna, was once the seat of a fairly important abbey, recorded in the mid‑11c as belonging to the monastery of S. Pietro in Perugia, and in the 14c to the powerful abbey of Sassovivo near Foligno. The church has survived, but not much of the conventual buildings. Church and abbey were dedicated to the same saint — the archangel Michael — but are often referred to by different names: S. Michele for the church, S. Angelo for the abbey; and in central Italy buildings honoring the archangel quite commonly run by either name.

The church itself, then, shows several phases of construction and repair, and is as good an illustration as any of Thayer's Axiom: the larger the stones, the older the stonework. Here you see the largest stones — for the most part not sandstone like the rest of the building, but assorted limestones — in the foreground, at the base of the façade: if these stones are not all the remains of an actual predecessor building from classical Antiquity on this spot, at least some of them almost certainly are Roman. (Scale: that blue pen is exactly 14 cm long).