The St. Nilo Abbey of Grottaferrata has a very particular origin in the history of monasticism in Italy: it is the only surviving Italo-Greek monastery among those strewn across the south of Italy and the Eastern Sicily. These monasteries on Latin ground have, for centuries, been the expression of Greek-Byzantine liturgy, spirituality and culture.
The Basilian community was guided by St. Nilo of Rossano who was an attentive and skilful calligrapher and founder of the conventual complex of St. Adriano Corone in San Demetri Calabria. He had already gathered the manuscripts that were to become the first nucleus of the monastic library before the foundation of the Abbey. These manuscripts regarded the Holy Scriptures, ecclesiastic history, religious and ascetic patristic literature, grammar, lexicons and rhetoric treaties.
Grottaferrata adds the admiration for peculiar book treasures that the Abbey has produced and preserved in the course of the centuries to the religious ideal, the sense of history, the splendour of the structures that the monastic centers of Montecassino, Casamari, Farfa, Praglia, Badia di Cava offer us. These books are today subject matter for national and international studies and research.
The National Committee instituted for the Millennium Celebration of the foundation of the St. Nilo Abbey is a testimony of the recognition of its central position in European cultural history. The Committee is also an operational means to accomplishing a large program of initiatives, among which the census and cataloguing of the Greek language manuscripts written between the VI and XVI centuries in the South of Italy, starting with the ones preserved in the Library of the National Monument. The manuscript is an exceptional representation of civilization and therefore a privileged witness of History.

Francesco Sicilia
General Director of the General Direction
for Beni Librari and Cultural Institutes