Santa Maria Assunta a Monte Oliveto Minore, Benedictine monastery in San Gimignano, Italy.
Santa Maria Assunta a Monte Oliveto Minore is a Benedictine monastery with a stone facade featuring a columned portico and a single-nave church with side chapels. The complex also includes a fifteenth-century cloister with three-sided arcades surrounding a central lawn area.
The monastery was founded in 1340 and underwent major reconstruction in the mid-1400s that shaped its current appearance. This building campaign transformed the site into the form visitors encounter today.
The sacristy beside the choir keeps Renaissance furnishings, while the church interior is covered by a cross vault with Baroque stuccoes dated 1698. In the cloister, the fresco of the Crucifixion was painted in 1466 by the workshop of Benozzo Gozzoli.
The monastery sits about one kilometer from San Gimignano on the Via Francigena, an old pilgrimage route running through the Tuscan countryside. A visit works well as a countryside walk outside the town walls.
The tomb of Master Antonio Salvi stands beside the choir, not in the cloister. He taught at Volterra from 1395 to 1398, had been tutor to Sozomeno in 1402, and died in 1411, the year he was buried in this church.
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