Here's an article about The 1,000-year-old abbey of S. Nilo in Grottaferrata, "unique in Italy for its Catholic monks who follow a Greek-Byzantine rite."
On a hill overlooking Rome in the Castelli Romani, 15 ageing monks are about to celebrate the 1,000th anniversary of the foundation of an unusual abbey.
It is the abbey of S. Nilo, which dominates the tiny village of Grottaferrata, three km downhill from Frascati and 20 km from Rome. The main road swishes by it, which is perhaps why few people have heard of it.
The abbey, built atop a Roman villa which some scholars think may have belonged to Cicero, looks as though it could be straight out of Umberto Eco’s "The Name of the Rose". It is protected within a Renaissance castle with thick cannon-proof walls, corner bastions, a serious-looking defence tower and a dried-up moat. It is a sprawling place, with five inner cloisters, two monastery blocks, the church, a lofty refectory and two libraries housing 50,000 volumes, the fiercely out-of-bounds older one guarding 1,000 ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the seventh century.
However, it could never be the setting for Eco’s whodunit. For one thing, visitors roam around it daily, and there are popular guided tours at weekends. For another, its walls are plastered with inscriptions in Greek, and the monks chant in Greek. The abbey is unique in Italy: an Italian-Byzantine monastery following the Greek-Byzantine rite, yet its monks are Catholics.
"We are the only Byzantine monastery in Italy to have remained faithful to Rome after the east-west schism," explained the archimandrite or abbot. "In that consists our uniqueness," he said. The schism took place in 1054, tearing Christianity apart, splitting it up into opposing eastern (in Constantinople) and western (in Rome) camps. [continue]
Thanks to Archaeology in Europe for pointing out this site.
Related:
Abbazia di S. Nilo -from hurricane.it. In Italian.