The architectural and building culture of the Benedictines congregation “de Unitate” in the Renaissance. A network of monasteries and building sites

The aim of this paper is to discuss the architectural culture of the Cassinese Benedictine congregation in Italy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The renewal of the spiritual life of the monk elaborated by Ludovico Barbo, the founder of the Congregation, required the centralisation of all decisions concerning the building activity of the 111 monasteries, leading to the formation of a unitary architectural culture. The introduction of the cell led to the need to build monasteries with many cloisters and the increase in the number of monks forced the construction of gigantic churches. The resulting considerable increase in construction costs was multiplied by the simultaneous opening of many building sites throughout Italy. Common building regulations standardised and centralised the layout of the monasteries and the decision-making process, but also the organisation of the building sites. An enormous quantity of unpublished documents allows us to demonstrate that between one building site and another, teams of workers, building materials (such as bricks, made in kilns specially built by the monks, or stone quarried from mines owned by some abbeys, or wood taken from forests cultivated by the monks) and technologies circulated, especially the multiple dome system adopted in churches (Santa Giustina in Padua, San Sisto in Piacenza, etc.). It is possible to study this phenomenon from a comparative perspective and thanks to the experimental use of the Building Information methodology Modeling (BIM) that will allow to manage a large amount of heterogeneous data (archival, bibliographic, material, geometric-spatial).