Cairate Monastery

The Cairate Monastery is a very important archeological site, a monument with a long history to tell. 

Abandoned for many years, from 2000 it was the object of a very important restoration work, ended in 2013. The Monastery has rediscovered his beauty and is now opened to public.

The Monastery dell'Assunta in Cairate dates back at the first half of the 8th Century, period of  consolidation and transmission of Benedictine culture, and it is one of the first monastic settlements in the  territory of present-day Lombardy, linked to the nearby presence of the Castrum of Castelseprio and the Monastery of Torba.

The foundation would belong to Manigunda, Lombard noblewoman who in 737 would have sanctioned the birth of a women's monastery. It was also originally intended to serve as a curtis, namely administrative seat of the extended landed property  with which it was endowed, whose wealth derived from the fact that its mills were the only place in the area where wheat could be ground. 

The monumental complex is made up of three parts: the monastery, corresponding to the cloister quadrilater, with the rooms facing it; the Northern district or of San Pancrazio, built between 1481 and 1560,  in the occasion of the absorption of the small monastery of the same name, located in the nearby of Casale Litta; the cottages of the Western court, dated between 18th Century and the first half of the 19th Century.