Villa San Faustino abbey

Built with material recovered from Roman buildings, it is uniform in structure and colour due to the use of local travertine. The church, dedicated to San Faustino, probably disciple and confessor of the bishop of Civitas Martana San Felice, and the adjoining monastery, were built by Benedictine monks on the tomb of the saint.
The façade is in Lombard style architecture, unfortunately altered by the construction of the portico in front of it; a beautiful triple lancet window with marble columns remains from the original structure. The interior, with a single nave, is much altered; at the centre of the apse there are two sarcophagi, one of which is venerated as being that of San Faustino.
Inside, there is a fresco by the Arezzo painter Sebastiano Florii depicting the Madonna del Rosario (1580). The bell tower is also recent and stands, with an imposing structure, separate from the church; the adjoining building, on the other hand, which constituted the abbey complex, has retained the unusual form of a mighty rural house. The simplicity of the rustic structure shows that, unlike other Benedictine abbeys, the complex of San Faustino was not able to assert its power, since from the 11th century it was dependent on the Abbey of Farfa. If you look carefully at the façade, to the right of the three-mullioned window you will notice an epigraph with the inscription of Lucius Julius Marcianus and his wife Publicia, clearly of Roman reuse, and to the left a fragment of Doric frieze with metopes with rosettes and bucrania. Many of the buildings in the area were constructed using waste material from pre-existing Roman buildings; a very common practice in this area; ancient artefacts are also found incorporated in other churches and abbeys in the Masseto area.