Known in antiquity as “Neroma” and later “Caput Gauri”, Codigoro takes its name from the river Goro that with the Volano represented the first water resources on which to base the wealth and growth of the town. A destination for fishermen and hunters, its history dates back to the 9th century, when the Benedictine community started its population growth. The territory of Pomposa was the place where the first settlements started and from the same is dated the construction of the Abbey which immediately gave great prestige to the city. In the middle of the 1100s the surrounding canals and the great water resources were lost and with them the interests of conquest by the Ferrarese and the Benedictines who abandoned the lands diminished. A first reclaim of the lands were in 1464, while towards the end of the nineteenth century dated the construction of a first water-drainage plant, thanks to which the city resumed its definitive development. Now its lands are totally stabe in the Po Valley, within the Regional Park of the Po Delta.
Sala delle Stilate of Pomposa Abbey
Today, the pomposian complex consists on the Abbey Church of Santa Maria with its bell tower, the chapter hall, the refectory, the so-called “Sala delle Stilate” and the dormitory (now Museo Pomposiano) which describe the cloister, missing from the west side; it also includes the “Palazzo della Ragione” and the enclosure of the cemetery of the monks located at north of the church.
The “Sala delle Stilate”, considering the articulation of the conventual space that belongs to the cloister, is an anomalous compartment and of uncertain destination: usually in the convents the place where the hall was located was reserved for the parlor and the dimensions and structure instead, they lead back to a warehouse, which during the following centuries would have been obstructed with walls of division and separation in relation to the new needs of use. The construction technique is with wooden braced pillars accompanied by infills that support a double order of beams and a simple plank. Just the use of this construction technique, documented in the Ferrara area and Bologna in the centuries before the fourteenth, puts into question the real functions of the room: if the wooden structure had been built with the intention to buffer spaces would have had greater simplicity in shape, without the tapering of the pillar and the stone plinth; moreover, the structure is rustic if compared with all the other wooden carpentries of the same period survived in the convent, worked in a refined manner and decorated according to the style and use of the period. The reason for a warehouse in this privileged position, in the first and most important cloister among refinedly decorated rooms remains unclear. Unfortunately not even the restoration work of the late twentieth century provide an answer to this question, indeed they raise others by noting an inconsistency between the foundations found and the walls marked in the drawings.
Address
Sala delle Stilate dell’Abbazia di Pomposa: street Pomposa Centro, 12 S.S. 309 Romea – 44021 Codigoro (Fe)
Contacts
Municipality of Codigoro – cultural office: Ph. +39 0533 729585/6