Abbadia Cerreto, Cistercian Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul

Built by Cistercian monks over earlier foundations from 1084, it provides a valuable example of Lombard Cistercian architecture and marks the passage from the Romanesque style to the Gothic. The church shows chromatic decoration of the surface, with a simple, linear and rational division of space, as is already evident in the facade, preceded by a portico formed of three sections and divided by buttresses
The different heights of the parts of the facade suggest the internal division into three naves and the visible buttresses along the northern side indicate the sections.
In the construction of the abbey church, with the perfect match between the inside and the outside, inspired architectural criteria converge with the ideas of St. Bernard.
The essentials of the structure correspond to the sobriety of the lives of the monks, the existens minimum which started with St. Bernard.
The abbey continued to prosper throughout the middle ages, until, at the threshold of the modern age, it lost the importance for the Economy which the monks had created for it. The abbey only recovered from this state of obsolescence was only lifted under the abbot Federico Cesi. In 1542, he promosted a total reform of the abbey, changing the architectural structures of the church and the monastery. Probably at the end of this work, Cesi commissioned the great Cesi Altar-piece from the famous painter Callisto Piazza. The painting represents the “Madonna and Child, Saints and the purchaser, Federico Cesi” and is seen as one of the painter’s most significant works. The Callisto Altar-piece is also the first large painted piece inside the abbey, which before that had been free of any kind of decoration.
In 1798 the abbey was closed and the monks abandoned Cerreto.