History

The Po Delta in the early medieval period was a landscape of marshes, islands, and navigable channels, traversed by the trade routes between Ravenna (the western Roman imperial capital from 402 CE) and Venice. The Benedictines established themselves on the Pomposa island in the ninth century, building a modest church and monastic buildings. Under the abbots of the eleventh century — particularly Guido d’Arezzo’s contemporary Martino — the abbey became a centre of musical culture: it had a library, a scriptorium, and a reputation for liturgical choral singing that attracted scholars.

Guido d’Arezzo’s precise biography is uncertain, but he is known to have spent time at Pomposa before moving to Arezzo, and his Micrologus (c. 1025–1030), the foundational text of Western music theory, was completed at one of these two locations. The system of assigning syllables to the notes of the hexachord (ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la, taken from the first syllables of the lines of the Ut queant laxis hymn to John the Baptist) gave singers a way to sight-read music without a keyboard instrument — the foundation of Western musical education from the eleventh century to the present.

The abbey declined in the later medieval period as malaria made the Po Delta increasingly uninhabitable; in 1653 it was suppressed, and the monastic complex was used for agricultural storage until the nineteenth century. The church, campanile, and Palazzo della Ragione were consolidated and opened as a monument; the site has been managed as an archaeological monument by the Italian state since 1919.