Archimandrite is Arsenois II (Pellegrini), the seventy-ninth in direct succession from St Neilos (not counting the bad period of the Commendatory Archimandrites).[1] In the first period (till the fifteenth century) this monastery was not the most important of its rite in Italy. St Saviour at Messina eclipsed it easily. Then it became the chief. Now it is the only one left. The whole Italo-Greek Basilian Congregation is reduced to this one house.
Grottaferrata, with its wonderful traditions, its strange rite out there in the middle of the Roman Campagna, its splendid library, and the amazing picturesqueness of its old ramparts and towers, among the vineyards and olive orchards, on the slopes of the Alban hills, is one of the most fascinating places in Italy. Greek and Catholic, it should form a bond between the East and the West. It is always a standing witness that to be a Catholic does not mean giving up the venerable rites of the East. In 1904, at the nine-hundredth anniversary of his death, they put a statue of St Neilos in the court before the church. He stands there looking towards Rome across the hot Roman plain; while his successor rules his monks under the authority of the successor of the Pope he came to Rome to see.[2]
- 2. The Greek College at Rome.
The second great centre of the Italo-Greeks is the "Pontificium Collegium Græcorum de Vrbe." I doubt if any of the Roman colleges has so interesting or so important a history as this; though it has not always been quite a glorious one. The Greek college was founded in 1577 by Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585). Gregory founded a number of colleges at Rome for different nations. Among others he thought of the Greeks, at that time groaning under the yoke of the Turk, and lost to the Church through their schism. His idea was that Greek boys should be educated here, that they should have the advantage of what was then one of the chief centres of Western civilization, and at the same time be well grounded in the
- ↑ There were altogether fifteen Commendatorii. The list is given in A. Rocchi, "La Badia di Grottaferrata" (Rome, 1904), p. 37, n. 1; the real Archimandrites, ibid., pp. 31-32.
- ↑ The chief work about Grottaferrata is A. Rocchi, "De Cœnobio Cryptoferratensi eiusque bibliotheca et codicibus præsertim græcis commentarii," Tusculi (Frascati), 1893. More popular are A. Rocchi, "La Badia di Grottaferrata" (2nd edition, Rome, 1904); F. Pometti, "Nel Centenario della fondazione della Badia di Grotta ferrata" (Bergamo, 1903); A. Pellegrini, Ἡ ἑλληνικὴ μονὴ τῆς Κρυρτοθέρης (Syra, 1904); C. Mencacci, "Cenni storici della Badia di S Maria di Grottaferrata" (Rome, 1875).
