San Giovanni in Valle
A possible baptismal area
During the first stage of work on the valorisation of the monastic complex, carried out in 2008 with the aim of finding a better use for the Longobard Temple and the Monastery cloister, archaeological investigations were performed in several points. The investigation also concerned the area between the south wall of the Temple and the apse of the church of San Giovanni, allowing important information to be recovered about the use of the Gastaldaga area and the organisation of the buildings of worship.
The excavation brought to light a first phase of occupation witnessed by the remains of large monastic environments, the traces of which had already emerged in the surveys carried out during the restoration work in 1962 inside the sacristy of the Temple. These were large communicating rooms which probably extended eastwards well beyond the present limit on the banks of the Natisone, the position of which is evidently the result of collapses in the past. A building with an apse was then constructed on top of this structure, located immediately behind the church of San Giovanni and aligned with it. The new building seems to have been inserted into the older premises which were reused and given a new floor of crushed terracotta, laid over the original mosaic floor. Unfortunately there are no data at the moment for understanding the chronological relationship between the building with an apse and the construction of the Temple, even though it cannot be excluded that both buildings coexisted at some time. The floors within the semicircle of the building with an apse have not survived, having been completely removed during the later activities that took place in the area. The function of this building as a baptistery would seem to be suggested by the limited remains of a basin, aligned with the centre of the apse, which seems to have steps covered with crushed terracotta mortar and a bottom made of marble slabs, apparently hexagonal in shape. Hence the fascinating hypothesis that the basin may have belonged to a hexagonal font, rather than to a reliquary, and that it may have been associated with the hexagonal arch of a ciborium, kept in the National Archaeological Museum, made by a workshop that was quite close, as regards formal quality, to the one that worked on the decoration of the font in the Cathedral, ordered by the Patriarch Calixtus. Both these works were produced between the fourth and the fifth decade of the 8th century, perhaps by the same workshop. If this were true it would confirm the existence of the font in the Gastaldaga in the first half of the 8th century.
The baptismal building with apse connected to the church of San Giovanni in Valle met its fate prematurely, since towards the end of the Early Middle Ages (perhaps from the 9th – 10th century) the area was used as the monastery’s burial ground. Numerous tombs have been found, containing the remains of females of various ages.