Louis II, a descendant of Charlemagne, founded this abbey in 871 after promising a church to Saint Clement while held captive in Benevento. Saracen raiders wrecked it in the tenth century and Norman armies again in the eleventh; the Benedictines rebuilt it between the 1105 reconsecration and abbot Leonate's late-twelfth-century campaign.
The facade's bronze doors, cast in 1191, still carry 72 panels of crosses, abbots and the fourteen castles the abbey once controlled in the Pescara valley. Earthquakes struck again and again after that: in 1349, in 1456, and most recently in 2009, when the L'Aquila quake closed the church until a restoration reopened it in April 2011. Set alone in open countryside above the Pescara river, the abbey looks less like a tourist stop than a monument that simply keeps rebuilding itself.
