Fossanova

The Cistercian abbey south of Rome where Aquinas died on his way to the Council of Lyon, a few months after he stopped writing.

Fossanova was a Cistercian house in the marshland below the Lepine hills. Aquinas fell ill on the road to Lyon and was carried here, where the monks gave him a room and asked him, in his last days, to comment on the Song of Songs. He had written nothing since the previous December, when something happened during Mass that made him say all he had written seemed like straw. He was forty-nine.