The patroness of Deruta is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, celebrated on 25 November.
This is the town of ceramics — with the regional museum, the workshops and two schools of ceramic art — and here devotion has taken the form of maiolica. In the sanctuary of the Madonna del Bagno there are more than seven hundred ceramic ex-votos: the story begins in 1657, when a merchant from Casalina, Cristoforo, firmly fixed an image of the Madonna to an oak tree and asked her to heal his gravely ill wife; on returning home, the story goes, he found her healed. On 16 July of that year husband and wife went back to the oak and hung the first ex-voto there. The church we see today, completed around 1687, is an enlargement of the chapel built on the spot in 1657-1658.
