The abbey of Santa Maria di Lucedio was founded in the first quarter of the twelfth century, most probably in 1123, by Cistercian monks from the monastery of La Ferté, near Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy. The marquis Ranieri I of Montferrat gave them land to reclaim, then marshy and covered with uncultivated scrub, called locez: hence the name. The abbey was built as a fortified structure and grew for three centuries, becoming one of the sacred places most closely tied to the Aleramici dynasty, so much so that many marquises chose to be buried there.
What to see
Inside the walls, important parts of the medieval monastery survive: the bell tower, unusual for its octagonal plan resting on an earlier square base, in Lombard Gothic; the cloister; the chapter house of the mid thirteenth century, with stone columns and capitals of early medieval cut; the hall of the lay brothers, with slender sail vaults resting on low columns. There are two churches. The old abbey church, of the years around the middle of the twelfth century, had grown unsafe and was pulled down to make room for a Baroque building put up between 1767 and 1770 by the monk architect Valente de Giovanni. The second is the so-called church of the people, of 1741, designed by Giovanni Tommaso Prunotto, a collaborator of Juvarra, and intended for the peasant families who lived at Lucedio.
Visiting
The abbey's holdings were enormous and organised by the Cistercian method: the land was divided into granges, and at the head of each stood not a monk, already taken up by his hours of prayer, but a lay brother able to make it pay. The lay brothers directed the work of free wage-earning peasants and answered to the cellarer, the monk who ran everything on the abbot's behalf. Among the abbots, the blessed Oglerio of Trino led Lucedio from 1205 to 1214. In 1457 the monastery ceased to depend on the Cistercians and became a commendam of the Palaeologi; in 1784 it passed to the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus and the remaining monks, by then about ten, were moved elsewhere. Napoleon handed it to Camillo Borghese, and in 1861 the estate went to the Genoese Raffaele de Ferrari, duke of Galliera, on whom the Savoys conferred the title of prince of Lucedio: the words Principato di Lucedio can still be read on the entrance gate.
Our editors' tip
Lucedio today is a working farm, and that is the point: the Cistercians came to drain a marsh, and the marsh has become the paddy field that still surrounds the walls. The cycle they set going has never been broken, only changed owner. Many legends circulate about the abbey, of secret crypts, of mummified abbots seated in a circle on thrones and of a column that weeps: they are late tales, fed by the atmosphere of the courtyards and above all of the chapter house, and they are worth knowing as legends. The thing really worth looking at is the octagonal bell tower, which resembles no other on the plain.