The former Monastery of the Poor Clares of Cerreto Sannita is an ancient place of worship founded in 1369 by Francesca Sanframondi, collateral relative and chamberlain to Queen Joanna I of Naples as well as a relative of Giovanni III Sanframondi, count of Cerreto Sannita. Rebuilt after the June 5, 1688 earthquake, the monastery housed the order of Urbanist Poor Clares from the 14th century to the 20th century when it became the property of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Good and Perpetual Help, who established a boarding school, kindergarten, language high school, school and teacher training institute there, naming the complex after Pope Leo XIII. The church attached to the monastery is a splendid example of Baroque architecture. Remained intact over the centuries, it preserves in the pronaos an 18th-century ceramic floor.
The minutes of the various trials that took place over the years between the bishops and the nuns, preserved in the archives of the Episcopal Curia, provide a wealth of information about the life of the Poor Clares within the monastery and their relations with the outside world.
History
The foundation The Monastery of the Urbanist Poor Clares of Cerreto Sannita was founded by Francesca Sanframondi, widow of Pietro de Cadenet, collateral relative and chamberlain to Queen Joanna I of Naples. According to Nicola Rotondi Francesca was the daughter of Giovanni III, count of Cerreto from 1285 to 1319, while according to Dante Marocco she was sister of Giovanni and daughter of Leonardo Sanframondi.
On January 3, 1369 the apostolic letter of foundation of the monastery was issued, sent to the bishop of the time Monsignor Giacomo da Cerreto and which Rotondi translates as follows:
The monastery, however, became fully functional only a few months later since when the foundress Francesca Sanframondi drew up her will on February 10, 1369, in the presence of Queen Joanna I, she arranged to be buried temporarily in the chapel of St. John the Apostle in the church of St. Anthony in Cerreto, in the meantime that the building would be completed.
Moreover, it is not certain whether Sanframondi spent the last years of her life in the monastery. In fact, Rotondi in this regard says that "Nor does it appear from any monument that at an old and advanced age she had closed herself there to pass safely, and far from the turbulence of the Court, the life that remained to her." Upon her death, Francesca was buried behind the high altar of the Church of the Poor Clares in a tomb where the Sanframondo coat of arms, consisting of a saltire in gold on a blue field, and a stone statue depicting her, still visible in a pillar of the present cloister in the 19th century, stood out.
The first abbess of the monastery was Caterina Sanframondi, who, according to Rotondi, was the daughter of Pietro and cousin of the foundress Francesca, while for Morocco she was the daughter of Giovanni and therefore Francesca's niece. She was appointed abbess by a brief dated Jan. 8, 1369, from Cardinal Albanese by which she was ordered to move from the monastery of Santa Maria di Donna Regina in Naples to that of Cerreto along with sisters Giovanna and Agnese Sanframondi, Rita and Caterina di Cetano, Chiarella da Pietraroja and Francesca da Cerreto.
Caterina, during the 30 years she was abbess, enriched the monastery with many houses and lands scattered in the municipalities of Cerreto, San Lorenzello, Massa and Limata, and had the exemption of the same from the payment of tithes. In 1397 she obtained permission from Pope Benedict XII to leave the cloister for health reasons and to move to the house of Nicolò, who is referred to in the brief as her brother, thus suggesting, according to Pescitelli, a Rotondi genealogy.
Upon Caterina's death, the second abbess Margherita Sanframondi had a marble tomb made, which is preserved today in the atrium of the former monastery. It was found in 1842 in a room of the building as being of abbess Maria Beatrice Pacelli. In 1843 Rotondi interpreted its inscription located above the bas-relief depicting Sanframondi, which reads:
The monastery and church in old Cerreto According to the historian Pacichelli,Pacichelli, Del Regno di Napoli in prospettiva, Mutio, 1703. the monastery, facing south, occupied a wing of the Sanframondo castle along with the Conventual Fathers of St. Anthony, and was located precisely opposite them, so much so that in a trial preserved in the Archives of the Episcopal Curia of Cerreto Sannita it is written that: "above once the Sisters could be seen, who in their rooms were busy with their work."Archivio Curia Vescovile di Cerreto Sannita: Monache - processi, vol. VII. Overlooking the complex was a square on which the respective churches entitled to St. Mary Mother of God and St. Anthony of Padua also stood.
Originally there were two doors of access, one to the church and another to the monastery to which a new door was added in 1631 that led into the parlor where the nuns through a grating spoke with relatives. Before then the access to the parlor was located in the church but Monsignor Gambacorta wanted to close this entrance to prevent people from passing through it.Archivio Curia Vescovile di Cerreto Sannita: Atti di Santa Visita per mons. Gambacorta, 1631.
The main door gave access to a cloister from which a stairway arose that ended in a corridor and which in 1596 turned out to be barred by a door that led into a large dormitory, consisting of nineteen cells, lit by a large window that by order of Monsignor Savino was partly walled up to prevent the nuns from being able to see from the outside. In addition to this dormitory there was another room, above it. According to Pescitelli this was how the building must have been from its foundation to the end of the 16th century, without major structural changes.
At the beginning of the 17th century, there were two dormitories, one facing west with seventeen cells and another at the south with seven small rooms while another consisting of five rooms was being completed. In 1670 Monsignor Marioni counted six dormitories: the old one with eight rooms; the one under the tower with six cells; a third one above the refectory with eleven rooms; a fourth one overlooking the monastery oven with eight small rooms; a fifth one that overhung the square in front of the complex and had four rooms; and a sixth one located above the tower with two cells, next to which was a room used as a prison. In 1686 Bishop Giovanni Battista de Bellis found two more dormitories, the first with nine rooms and the second with five that jutted out over the castle moat. Finally De Bellis saw that the tower dormitory had been enriched with another room, making a total of fifty-five cells. There were also an oven, a kitchen, a wash-house, a refectory, a pantry, a granary, a cellar and a chicken coop where each nun, according to an ancient custom, had her own chickens.
The church, located to the right of the monastery,Archivio Curia Vescovile di Cerreto Sannita: Atti di Santa Visita per mons. Savino, 1596. was quite large. According to Rotondi it was dedicated to the Holy Spirit, but Pescitelli refutes this thesis because there is no trace of that designation in historical documents and opts instead for the dedication to St. Mary Mother of God, like the present place of worship.
The high altar was surmounted by a canvas depicting the descent into the Upper Room of the Holy Spirit. Near it, on the wall facing the monastery, was a grate from which the Poor Clares received communion, and behind the high altar was the sacristy, which was very cramped and where the tomb of the foundress Francesca Sanframondi was located. Preceding that altar and to the left of it was a confessional and another altar that was torn down by order of Monsignor Gambacorta because it was too close to the high altar. Next was the altar of the Conception of the Raho and that of the Virgin's Nativity of the De Blasio. Next to the latter was another confessional and the door, bricked up in 1631, leading to the parlor where there were three grates and the wheel of outcasts through which the nuns exchanged artifacts with the outside. At the opposite wall were a chapel of the De Niro entitled All Saints. This was followed by the altar of the Crucifix and the altar of the Assumption.
The nuns and the earthquake of June 5, 1688
The earthquake of June 5, 1688, which razed the old medieval settlement to the ground, caught the nuns while they were intent on reciting vespers in the choir of the church, specially brought in by the abbess after the first premonitory tremor according to the account of one of the twenty-four surviving nuns in a memoir collected by Mazzacane:
Mazzacane adds:
Forty Poor Clare nuns perished under the rubble while twenty-four, including the abbess, were saved even though some of them, dug up after a few days, remembered nothing of what had happened. Of the nuns, seven out of eleven died. The chaplain and confessor also perished while the surviving nuns, in the confusion and fright caused by the incident, began to wander in the surrounding countryside, a territory completely unknown to them since the nuns had entered seclusion at a young age. De Bellis promptly provided for them by gathering them at the farmhouse of Baron Pietro Petronzi (near what is now vico aia) where they stayed under the surveillance of relatives and the bishop himself, who moved there with the entire bishop's court.
The surviving abbess, on whom, according to Pescitelli, fell the responsibility for the drama by not having allowed, after the premonitory tremor, the nuns to take refuge in a safer place, begged Monsignor De Bellis because "as they found themselves withdrawn in the courtyard of Pietro Petronzi under a miserable hut because of the tremor" to transfer the survivors to a more suitable place to accommodate them. De Bellis then got in touch with Count Marzio Carafa and with the assent of the Congregation of Bishops it was agreed to transfer the nuns to the hospital monastery in Maddaloni. Thus in July 1688 the nuns were transported, two by two, to their new quarters, escorted by the bishop himself, family members and the feudal lord's guards. On reaching Maddaloni they were received by Count Marzio Carafa, his brother Marino and the viceroy of Naples, Francesco Bonavides.
Nine nuns died in Maddaloni: abbess Sister Giuditta Mazzacane, Sister Teresa Petronzi, Sister Anna Mazzacane, Sister Maria Brigida Magnati, Sister Agnese and Giovanna Ciaburro, Sister Amalia and Grazia Nardella, Sister Lucrezia Mattei and lay sister Camilla Meola. On the other hand, nine nuns and two lay sisters were welcomed "with solemn feasts of Neapolitan music."
The monastery and church in present-day Cerreto The building of the monastery and church in present-day Cerreto, designed by Giovanni Battista Manni at the behest of Count Marzio Carafa, began immediately after the earthquake and was started by masons Andrea Pagano and Orazio and Giuseppe Paduano. Construction soon stopped due to lack of funds, and work was resumed only in August 1692 thanks to the sale of a capital of 2,000 ducats by the Prince of Colubrano.
Soon after completing the first dormitory, corresponding to the wing facing Piazza Roma, on December 8, 1696 the nuns returned to Cerreto from Maddaloni to their new monastery even though it still lacked any comforts. They temporarily built small kitchens in front of the cell entrances while, having collected the sum of 135 ducats, a corridor and a terrace toward the courtyard were built, a corridor plastered in 1705 by master Antonio Calise, in the same year in which he did the stucco work in the church. Sister Geltrude Corrado also spent from her own pocket 25 ducats for the construction of the oven.