Organisation in the early nineteenth century

The present configuration of the monastery is not only the result of the transformations in the 18th century, but also of the work done after it was bought by the Municipality of Cividale in 1812, to be used as a public school for girls.
A plan of the ground floor of the Monastery taken from a survey carried out when it was rented to the Benedictine sisters in 1812 allows us to identify the different functions of the spaces of the Monastery before those alterations, a self-sufficient space with its own living dynamics.

The part on via Monastero Maggiore is devoted to the kitchen and other rooms linked to that function: the pantry (12), the poultry pen (16), the oven (19), the stove (20),  the woodshed (23-24), the cellar (26), the store-room for empty barrels (28) and corticella even the pigsty (29) with a small vegetable garden (33) and the laundry rooms (36) near the access to the underground wash-house (36).

The kitchen is connected to the refectory (11) and to a small courtyard (17) that also leads to the spaces for relations with life outside the monastery divided into small rooms for use as a scriptorium and parlour (2-3-4-5-7-9).

Near the church of San Giovanni is the entrance to the monastery(53) with a small revolving door and a parlour for the doorkeepers(54); on the north side of San Giovanni are the choir and the confessional (47), a room with four columns used as a vestry or stanza room of the Most Holy Communion (49), a small chamber.

The vegetable garden with the well (37) is divided from the noble courtyard, the one with the cloister(56) by a construction with columns, partly devoted to the large cellar (42).

The other kitchen garden (46) was planted with vegetables and herbs.

On the first floor the plan describes numerous cells of different sizes, the novice house in the south-west corner on via Monastero Maggiore with its own kitchen; the refectory for sick nuns and the infirmary; the servants’ halls and the dormitories.

The attic floor was used as a grain store.