On 3 July, Silvana (Ave) Cerquetti, aged 96, a sculptor and co-founder of the Centro Ave Arte in Loppiano, returned to the Father’s house. Her funeral was held at the Maria Theotokos Shrine, her most cherished creation.
by Tamara Pastorelli
‘Down an alleyway in the village, there was a potter. I used to visit him often and, sitting on the stone step, I would stay there watching him as he worked.’ Thus, the sculptor Silvana Cerquetti, better known as ‘Ave’, recounted one of her clearest childhood memories, set during family holidays in the little village of Montefalco, in Umbria. ‘When I realised I could turn clay into lots of little figures, it was a great joy for me!’ Encouraged by her mother, she asked the potter for some clay. Christmas was approaching. With her little hands, young Silvana moulded figurines of the nativity scene characters, which her mother fired under the ashes and which she then painted, one by one. “News of this magnificent nativity scene spread throughout the village, and so the mayor, the prior and the magistrate came to see it: there was a great bustle of people!” It was 1936.
“I will create sacred art”
Fourteen years later, aged 20, we find her breathlessly climbing the stairs of Palazzo Venezia, now a talented student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. The first work she sees is a small painting by the French artist Georges Henri Rouault. “It was a face of Jesus. At the time I wasn’t at all interested in sacred art because I was an Evangelical, a Waldensian, but there, standing before that painting, my connection with Jesus was immediate. I was as if enraptured, at one with Him. I understood the value of sacred art: to convey God through art. At that moment I said: ‘I will create sacred art’.”
The encounter with the Focolare
Third memory. It is 1955. Silvana, having recently graduated from the Academy, is in Sassari, Sardinia, to create some sculptures. She is already a young talent: one of her works had been chosen to represent the Academy’s students at the 1952 Venice Biennale. On the island, she was a guest of the Pious Educator Sisters, whom she had met during a time of deep crisis, whilst searching for the “fullness of truth”. One morning, a priest suggested she meet some young women he had met in Trento, who had just arrived in Sassari. The joyful welcome she received from those young women opened up her horizons: ‘We were still in the small entrance hall and I immediately had the extraordinary sensation of entering into that unity, harmony and beauty of creation which I had contemplated many times before, and I said to myself: “Here is God, here is the Church!”’.
It was her first encounter with the Focolare. It was the truth she had been seeking: in July of that same year, she took all the necessary steps to return to the Catholic Church in which she had been baptised and, upon her return to Rome, she kept in touch with the Focolare women.
In Latin America
She was 28 years old when some family friends working in the diplomatic corps in El Salvador invited her to their country for a cultural exchange. Silvana settled in the capital, San Salvador, where she quickly became part of the artistic scene: she taught sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, received numerous public honours, and gave a series of talks on national television. And she continued to live out the spirituality of unity: “I tried to love my neighbour as if they were all my brothers and sisters: I visited prisoners, the poor and the sick; I went to hospitals to give blood. And every time I returned, there was another job or professional assignment waiting for me.” She returned to Italy in 1960, undertaking a long journey in stages to Marian shrines. “In this way, I realised that the whole period I spent in San Salvador (almost three years) had been a preparation by the Lord to enable me to give myself entirely to Him,” she recalled.
The Ave Arte Centre is founded
“Quench this thirst for beauty that the world feels: send great artists, but mould through them great souls who, with their splendour, will lead people towards the most beautiful of the sons of men: Jesus.” These are the verses, written in her own hand, which Chiara Lubich offered as a guiding message to the nascent “Ave Arte Centre”, the studio founded in a garage in Rome in May 1961 by Silvana, together with the sculptor Tecla Ranucci and the painter Marika Tassi. Three Focolare women artists who had felt an inner urge no longer to work alone but together, sharing a common spiritual and artistic journey. The name of the Centre was also proposed by Lubich, who christened it ‘Ave’, so that every work might be experienced as a greeting to Our Lady. Silvana, who became its first head and artistic director (until 2004), also took that name for herself. “It was all so vast, so much to do,” she recalled. “We threw ourselves into it wholeheartedly, with all our love, to live the Gospel, to be ready to give our lives for one another. Life is given only once, but we could die to ourselves at any moment in order to live for the other.’
In Loppiano
In 1965, the Ave Centre moved to Loppiano. Workshops for sculpture, painting, design and graphic art were established, and ranges of ceramics for home décor and the reproduction of small sacred objects were launched. Her best-known and most beloved sculptures saw the light of day: *La Bella Accoglienza*, *Madonna del Buon Cammino*, *Madonna della Neve* and *The Crucifixion with Mary in Sorrow*.
In 1996, Chiara Lubich, in agreement with Bishop Giovannetti, entrusted her with the design of the church that was to be built in Loppiano. After months of reflection, Ave found inspiration and sketched her idea in pencil, which was immediately transformed into a clay model. The Maria Theotokos Shrine, perhaps Ave’s greatest masterpiece and her most cherished work, was inaugurated in 2004.
And it was in this sanctuary that Ave was welcomed on Tuesday 7 July, before her final farewell, to join the Ave Centre, the citizens of Loppiano and all those who knew her in offering a collective ‘thank you’ for the gift of this artist who, moulded by the hands of the Potter, was able through her works to quench ‘the world’s thirst for beauty’.
E nel suo Santuario Ave è stata accolta, martedì 7 luglio, prima dell’ultimo saluto. Per dire assieme al Centro Ave, alla cittadella di Loppiano e a tutti quanti l’hanno conosciuta, un “grazie” corale per il dono di quest’artista che, plasmata dalle mani del Vasaio, con le sue opere ha saputo saziare «la sete di bellezza che il mondo sente».
Photo gallery
Ave Cerquetti (9 August 1930 – 3 July 2026)
Photos © Centro Ave/Loppiano Archive