LANCIANO, ARCHDIOCESE OF - City and archdiocese in the province of Chieti. It has an area of 26,216 sq. km. with a population of 192,344, of whom 190,925 are Catholics. It comprises 37 parishes with 121 diocesan priests and 100 regular clergy, one seminary, 16 male religious communities and 33 female (1949).
It is not possible, as some ancient historians would have it, to assign the diocese of L. (Anxanum) to the 7th century. Moreover, there are absolutely no historical sources before the 10th century, when in 973 we have news of the foundation of the Benedictine abbey of S. Giovanni in Venere (Cottoneau, II, col. 2720). In 1515 L. was subject to the diocese of Chieti; but in that same year, on 27 June, Leo X
For more than half a century he followed all the excavations in Rome, taking notes, specimens for method and key; he examined with the help of skilled schedulers the archives of the Vatican and of Roman patrician families; he collected documents, drawings, prints, in Italy and abroad, bought entire collections and thus formed his superb collection of 60,000 drawings, sketches, prints of Roman monuments which today forms the pride of the Italian Institute of Archaeology and Art History. His cards (ca. 85,000) are partly preserved in the Institute itself and for the most part in the Vatican Library; they served for the complete formation of the monumental Forma Urbis Romae, published in 1901 under the care of the Accademia dei Lincei, after eight years of assiduous work (46 plates on a scale of 1 to 1,000).
His principal works are written in English (translated by his first wife); he had conceived them for the many English and Americans who then came to Rome to spend the winter, to spread among them knowledge of classical and Christian Rome. But written with that great knowledge of sources and material, with that clarity, with that exactness of method which were his own, they in fact turn out to be works of first reference and of great scientific value. Here are some of them: Ancient Rome in the light of modern discoveries (London 1888); The ruins and excavations of ancient Rome (ibid. 1892, Boston 1908, also translated into French); New tales of old Rome (London 1901); Wandering in the Roman Campagna (ibid. 1909, Boston 1924); Ancient and modern Rome (Boston 1925). In all these works he combined the study of antiquity with that of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, demonstrating a great breadth of information and a particular interest in the Rome of the popes: important in this regard are the two volumes Pagan and Christian Rome (London 1892, Boston 1908) and The Destruction of Ancient Rome (London 1899, with a French translation); these volumes show the transformation undergone through the centuries by the imperial city;
THE ANCIENT - THE ANDENBERG HUGO
ancient, divided by robust pillars. The church preserves a silver cross, chased and enamelled by Nicola da Guardiagrele in 1422. Other Romanesque-Gothic memories are preserved in the churches of S. Francesco and S. Lucia (the portals), S. Nicola di Bari (15th cent. and a bell tower of late Romanesque style) and those of S. Biagio (12th cent.), with rough Romanesque forms and a crenellated bell tower, and S. Agostino, which, besides the portals and the rose window in a Gothic style with Apulian forms, houses three most precious reliquaries of the 15th century. Finally, noteworthy near L., the very ancient abbey of S. Giovanni in Venere, founded together with the famous and very rich Benedictine monastery (now destroyed) in 973, whose abbots enjoyed the favour of popes and emperors, before the fatal decline began in the 14th century. Today, the church, in its Romanesque guise, lives only on memories.