The Monastery

The community, which is located just outside Milan, seeks to pursue a life of authenticity starting from its sources: these are brought together by the power of the Gospel and regenerated by the Eucharist. The community thus aspires to serve as a welcoming residence enlivened by several aspects on which it is based: liturgical prayer, lectio divina, commitment to work, the search for brotherly and sisterly relations nurtured and constantly fuelled by the fire of evangelical charity that leads to a community based on hospitality, unceasing growth within the local Church and in the territory, the spiritual wisdom that is the interweaving of the perception of one’s own limits, and of the events in which God Himself speaks, and the call to assume the form of Christ. Participating in the intercession and sharing of goods, in the tribulations and needs of all of one’s neighbours.
Convinced that “the grace of monastic life lies at the heart of Christian testimony as the sign of the following of Christ and as authentic humanism” (p. B. Marin), we believe that “Christian life in its monastic form has its source and utmost expression in the pages of divine authority of the Old and New Testaments (RB 73,3) and that is why we are eager to share reading and listening workshops” (p. B. Marin).

The History

The Benedictine Community of Viboldone originated in 1936, in Montefiolo and at the Roman catacombs of Priscilla, around Mother Margherita Marchi (1901-1956). The insightfulness that animated the first sisters was the search for a female monachism inspired by Christian origins.
They arrived in Viboldone – a village immersed in the Sud Milano agricultural park, on the boundary of the great metropolitan city – on May 1, 1941, the date of the ecclesial recognition date of the Community, by Cardinal A.I. Schuster.
The Community received recognition as an aggregation from the Benedictine Confederation in March 1966. Cardinal Archbishop G.B. Montini also officially recognized the stability of the Benedictine monastic Community in Viboldone, deeming it opportune to build a monasterial building there that was more suited more to the numerous monastic presence. Viboldone thus rediscovered its original destination as “monastic village”.

The Activities

• Laboratory for the Restoration of Antique books which has operated for more than 40 years on paper and membranous documents belonging to Public institutes such as Libraries and Archives (state, regional and municipal), Ecclesiastic institutes (libraries and archives of parishes and seminars), and private individuals who wish to safeguard their goods in this area.
  Our choice of this field of work, which then becomes an art, falls within a tradition of the love of books and a love of writing proper to Benedictine monasticism, an art that seeks to give back to the object its original integrity. In that way, it has collaborated in the birth of a European culture and not just a European one at that, immersed in history and in the territory. This is one of the corollaries of the vow to “stability.”
• A typographical sector operates digitally with various activities: archiving of images: scans and OCR conversions; layout (Word), graphic layout (InDesign); paper-based or PDF proofreading; creation of brochures; editing.
• A book-binding sector: the various phases of recomposing of the volumes, bookbinding, cartography.
• The writing of icons on different media: wooden boards, Paschal candles, parchments.