The 2011 excavation concentrated on the courtyard area to the south of the present parish church, formerly the priory church. The work took the excavations begun in previous years down to natural and also opened a new area, further towards the interior of the large open space, continuing on from the northern half of the cloister’s west wing, also investigated in previous years.

The presence of a cloister to the south of the church was confirmed. The structure was arranged around a central open area, surrounded by colonnades (the west and north of which were identified abutting the southern perimeter of the church), which in turn bordered the buildings in which the daily life of the religious community took place. In particular, the excavation exposed the western wing of Romanesque date, at least 20 m long, and identified the point where the south-western wing joined it at a right-angle. At the point where the two buildings met, in the south-western corner of the cloister, a system of water pipes came to light, the metal fistulae still partially in situ. The pipes passed under the perimetral Romanesque walls, in phase with them, linking the internal area of the cloister with the exterior, towards the edge of the terrace of uncultivated scrubland on which the monastery stands. These structures confirm the hypothesis that the complex was well-planned from its conception.

The importance the monastery came to assume in the first centuries of its existence, even as regards its architecture, matches the development of its patrimony, as attested by the written sources. Its importance is also attested by the support of the lay aristocracy, whose presence is suggested, within the cloister itself, by the discovery of an inhumation burial inside a brick coffin, in the west wing. The tomb contained a prick spur with related buckle. The burial (containing two overlying skeletons) confirmed that the cloister colonnades were used for privileged burials, as previously documented in the western colonnade and is now known for the northern gallery, where further burials in brick coffins datable to the same period have been found.

Furthermore, the monastery was built on a site that seems to have been occupied in an earlier period, although at present it is difficult to define these phases of which numerous traces, including structural, were found during previous campaigns. More information about these early phases came when occupation levels were reached, containing numerous fragments of soap-stone, cut by the foundations of the Romanesque priory, and with the discovery of a small quadrangular room at the centre of the cloister area. The latter was associated with a cobble surface whose function remains to be clarified.

Regarding the developments in the full and late medieval periods, this excavation confirmed the evidence found in 2010, for example the tile flooring whose continuation to the south was uncovered, and acquired new data for the west wing of the cloisters in particular. Here, substantial alterations were seen, especially in the new internal divisions connected with the construction of a wall on an east-west alignment, linked to a channel, which reused sculpted and dressed stone elements. The channel entered the western perimeter wall of the Romanesque complex, attesting the latter’s progressive development until it was robbed in the modern period, sealed by its razing and the laying of the late 18th-19th century cobbled surface, uncovered in 2009 and whose continuation to the south was exposed during this campaign.