SANT'ANTIMO. — Ancient abbey 8 km from the diocese of Montalcino, in the small valley of the Starcia stream, a tributary of the Orcia River.
The origins of the monastery date back to the time of Charlemagne, who founded it in thanksgiving to God for the cessation of the plague that was decimating his army in the Val d'Orcia. Relics of ss. Antimo and Sebastiano were placed there, which Carlo had obtained from Pope Adrian I. In the very year of Carlo’s death, 814, his son Ludovico il Pio, by a diploma issued at Aquiserana, granted Montalcino and its territory in fief to the abbot of S. A. The primitive church is the one that presently serves as the sacristy: a small single-nave oratory, with a small apse behind the altar. The right-hand wall has monochrome frescoes depicting episodes from the life of S. Benedetto, attributed to Giovanni d'Asciano (14th century). Beneath the little church is the crypt, accessed from outside, with vaults supported by four small columns that divide it into three small naves. The present large church (44 × 16 m) was built in the first twenty years of the 12th century and is certainly one of the finest and most characteristic Romanesque churches in Italy, all the more so because it has undergone neither alterations nor disfigurement and, especially inside, may be considered intact. It is entirely of stone, including the interior, with three naves: the major one covered by a timber roof, the minor ones by vaults; it has a matroneum, an ambulatory behind the altar, and radiating chapels—a feature proper to Burgundian architecture and perhaps introduced by monks from France. On the high altar is a Madonna seated on a throne, with the Child, a polychrome wooden sculpture of the 13th century; on the façade wall, to the left, is a large wooden Crucifix, also from the 13th century. In the small crypt beneath the high altar, a 6th-century cemetery slab serves as the altar table. On the exterior, the walls of the lateral naves are now without the blind arcades that ran over the surviving semi-columns: this absence is almost certainly due to the subsidence of the upper part of these walls (later rebuilt with ordinary masonry) under the pressure of the matroneum’s vaults. The simple façade, too, originally had four arches in its lower section, two of them blind; a twin doorway opened in the two central ones, later replaced, perhaps at the beginning of the 13th century, by the single portal visible today. The handsome Romanesque bell tower is somewhat later than the church: one of the bells bears the engraved date 1219. Of the monastery, only a few remains survive, among them, notably, on the ground floor, a three-light window flanked by an arched doorway, which opened onto the cloister; it perhaps provided light to the chapter house.
The abbots of S. A. had, as has been said, civil jurisdiction over Montalcino as well, which they lost during the 13th century in their conflicts with Siena; they subsequently had purely ecclesiastical jurisdiction over many monasteries and churches in the territories of Siena, Grosseto, Arezzo, and Pistoia. The abbey was suppressed in 1462 by Pius II, because the number of monks had by then become small, discipline had relaxed, and the patrimony had been squandered. The remains of this patrimony formed the endowment of the bishop of Montalcino.