Abbey of Sant’Antimo

Abbey of Sant'Antimo tickets: which one to buy

The abbey church is free to enter and a donation box stands inside. A small ticket covers the crypt and the museum room. There is no public transport worth the name: Sant'Antimo sits in the Val d'Orcia below Montalcino, ten kilometres from the town on a country road, and everyone drives or cycles. Tours from Siena and Montalcino combine the abbey with Brunello wine tastings and cost several times the entry, the price being the car and the wine.

Guided visits of the church are offered by the monastic community at set times for a small fee. Nothing needs booking. The abbey is one of the most photographed buildings in Tuscany and is still remarkably quiet outside the middle of the day. The community sells honey, herbal liqueurs and recordings of their chant in a small shop beside the church.

Visiting Abbey of Sant'Antimo: what to see

The origins are obscure, and the legend that Charlemagne founded the abbey in 781 appears first in an eleventh-century document, which is to say it was invented when it was useful. The earliest real evidence is a land grant of 813. The present church was begun about 1118 in a French Romanesque manner unlike anything else in Tuscany, built of travertine and onyx-veined alabaster that turns honey-coloured in low sun and glows slightly from within.

It has an ambulatory with radiating chapels, a design brought back by pilgrims on the Via Francigena, and capitals carved with Daniel in the lions' den and other scenes by a master from Lombardy. The abbey declined, was suppressed in 1462 and stood empty for centuries; monks returned in 1992, and a community of Olivetan Benedictines has been here since 2016, singing the offices in Gregorian chant. A stone relief of a bishop on the south door and the alabaster columns of the ambulatory are the details most visitors photograph, and the crypt below the choir is older than the church above it.

Abbey of Sant'Antimo opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from morning to evening with a break in the middle of the day; the offices are sung through the day and Vespers in the late afternoon is the best time to be in the building, when the light comes through the east windows onto the alabaster. The Val d'Orcia is at its best in May and June and again in late September. Summer afternoons are hot and the abbey has no shade in its car park.

Dress modestly. Photography without flash is allowed outside services. Allow forty minutes. Montalcino, ten minutes uphill, has the fortress, the wine shops and the views; the hot springs at Bagno Vignoni are half an hour south. The road from Montalcino passes through vineyards and the abbey appears suddenly below the road, which is why the approach is part of the visit.