AT A GLANCE
Why go?
On a quiet road just outside the Salento hill town of Martano, in Italy's province of Lecce, the Monastery of Santa Maria della Consolazione sits in a green oasis of pines, centuries-old olive trees and citrus. A working house of Cistercian monks, it is at once a place of prayer, a guesthouse for those who want to slow down, and a small centre of monastic craft, scholarship and hospitality.↗↗
The site is far older than the buildings you see today. Long before the current convent, this was a patch of countryside associated with Byzantine-rite monks, and the monastery rose in the late 1600s around a rural chapel to the Virgin that local people already held in great devotion. The result is a rare chance to step inside a living Cistercian community in the deep south of Puglia, away from the baroque crowds of Lecce and the coast.↗↗
A Byzantine spring, a 17th-century convent
The story begins with the people of Martano. In the 1680s the town and its residents decided to give a small, much-venerated country church dedicated to the Madonna della Consolazione to the Alcantarine friars, building a convent around it on the site of an earlier basilian hermitage. Work began after the Archbishop of Otranto gave his assent in November 1685 and took about seven years; according to local tradition, the builders hauled the stone from the ruins of two nearby abandoned Byzantine chapels, a fitting reuse of a landscape that had known cenobitic monks for centuries.
