In the resort called Gole di San Martino you can visit the remains of a Benedictine Abbey, and . exactly of the church near it. According to a tradition, the Abbey was founded by San Benedetto( Saint Benedict), so in the sixth century AD, but in fact from historical records results that his foundation took place in the ninth or tenth century.
It's possible to study the history of the abbey getting information from documentary archives . At the beginning it was independent , as all Benedictine churches were, then in the 15th century, it was assigned to the Capitolo di San Pietro in the Vatican, successively to a feudatory, and finally annexed to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Chieti Diocese.
But this series of events was abruptly interrupted in September 1818 by river Verde(Green) flood, which destroyed it under a mass of debris. Today the ruins of the abbey are presented in a picturesque scenery of the rocks, part of a hard nature of a narrow gorge modified by the perennial flowing of Verde waters.
The first excavations to find the remains of the abbey, executed in 1891, and other recent works have made possible to discover parts of one side of the Church nave. architecture from the Abruzzi expert Ignazio Carlo Gavini in one of his works referring to San Martino in Valle describes its great stone portal, with composite structure, similar to that of San Clemente Abbey of Casauria, as well as the emerging parts of apse and nave.
The building was divided into a nave and two aisles, of which the nave ended with an apse. Next to the Church there were various units used as chapels, vestry and a small cemetery. Today it's possible to see only a wall that constituted the side wall of the nave of the Church, but is already planned a new work of excavations by the Abruzzo Soprintendenza ai beni culturali to remove debris other parts of the complex, worthy of being reported to the visibility for the historical and architectural importance of the past.