MuseumAbbey of Santa Maria di Cerrate

The Abbey of Santa Maria di Cerrate is a typical and extraordinary Italian story; it is a story that speaks of art and agriculture, of oriental monks and of wise Neapolitan administrators, of sculptors and Romanesque stonemasons close to Nicola Pisano and of fresco painters who wanted to get out of Byzantine fixity to rediscover, in the future, the language of classicism.

Cerrate speaks of generations of unknown men who in the wonderful olive groves that surround the Abbey dedicated their lives to that extraordinary landscape and to those olive trees whose fruits squeezed with sacrifice in the dark bowels of the Abbey.

And then he speaks, Cerrate, of a great architect of the '60s of the twentieth century, whose cultured language - even if today somewhat outdated - has suffered the injuries of more recent inopportune interventions.
Cerrate is a place of Italian cultural identity able to tell, with the traits of excellence, a history that is more than a thousand years that the FAI offers to deal with the delicacy and respect that it asks to be able to contribute to that role of social, civil and cultural centrality that has always played for Puglia, for Italy and for the civil world.