Bobbio Abbey

Columbanus was buried on 23 November 615, but was followed by successors of high calibre in Attala (d. 627) and Bertulf (d. 640), who steered the new monastery through the threats from militant Arianism under King Rotharis (636–652).

[1] In 628, when Bertulf made a pilgrimage to Rome, he persuaded Pope Honorius I to exempt Bobbio from episcopal jurisdiction, thus making the abbey immediately subject to the Holy See.

At first its observance was optional, but in the course of time it superseded the stricter Rule of Saint Columbanus, and Bobbio joined the Congregation of Monte Cassino.

[1] During the turbulent 7th century and through the efforts of Columbanus's disciples, increasing numbers of Arian Lombards were received into the Catholic form of Christianity.

However, during the first half of the 7th century, the large tract of country lying between Turin and Verona, Genoa and Milan, remained a relatively lawless state, with a mix of Arian and pagan religious practice.

In the last decades of the 9th century, Abbot Agilulph moved the monastery complex farther downstream[2] on the left bank of the river Trebbia.

In 1014, the Emperor Henry II, on the occasion of his own coronation in Rome, obtained from Pope Benedict VIII the erection of Bobbio as an episcopal see.

The Museum of the Abbey includes findings and remains from Roman (tombs, altars, sculptures) and Lombard ages (capitals, tombstones).

It houses also a polyptych by Bernardino Luini and the Bobbio collection, the second largest in the world, of Monza ampullae, pilgrimage flasks from the 6th century.

The collection includes works by Enrico Baj, Renato Birolli, Carlo Carrà, Massimo Campigli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Giorgio De Chirico, Filippo De Pisis, Ottone Rosai, Lucio Fontana, Achille Funi, Piero Manzoni, Mario Nigro, Giò Pomodoro, and Mario Sironi.

A late 9th-century catalogue, published by Lodovico Antonio Muratori (but now superseded by the edition of M. Tosi),[8] shows that at that period every branch of knowledge, divine and human, was represented in this library.

Gerbert of Aurillac (afterwards Pope Sylvester II) became abbot of Bobbio in 982, and with the aid of the numerous ancient treatises he found there, composed his celebrated work on geometry.