"The abbey of San Sebastiano, which lies not far from the town of Alatri in Southern Lazio, preserves within its walls almost fifteen hundred years of history. This history is unusually bound to a number of important figures, from Saint Benedict to Pope Nicholas V and his circle of humanists. For the past four years a small team has been investigating the extant structures of the abbey, analyzing the stratigraphy of the standing walls and tracing the various building phases. The study has produced some starting discoveries: the plan and preserved walls of one of the oldest monasteries in Europe, and one of the earliest Renaissance villas. The book gives an account of the architecture and the history of the building, showing how each phase relates to the previous one both structurally and thematically."--BOOK JACKET.