The Abbey of Santa Maria Staffarda in Revello was founded between 1122 and 1138 on the territory of the ancient Marquisate of Saluzzo. In a few decades the Abbey had achieved considerable economic importance as a place for the collection, processing and exchange of the products of the surrounding countryside, made fertile by the monks with extensive and complex reclamation works. The economic importance had brought civil and ecclesiastical privileges to the abbey which made it the reference of the political and social life of the territory. In 1690 the French, led by General Catinat invaded the Abbey, destroying the archive, the library, part of the cloister and the refectory; from 1715 to 1734, with the financial help of Vittorio Amedeo II, restoration works were carried out which partly altered the original Gothic forms of the architecture. With the Papal Bull of Pope Benedict XIV, in 1750, the Abbey and its assets became the property of the Order of SS. Maurizio and Lazzaro, and erected in the Commenda. Of the abbey complex we particularly appreciate the Church, with the Polyptych by Pascale Oddone and the sixteenth-century wooden group of the Crucifixion, the Cloister, the Refectory, with traces of a painting depicting the "Last Supper", the Chapter Room, the Guest House; the other buildings constitute the so-called “concentric” of Staffarda, that is the village, which still preserves the historical architectural structures functional to agricultural activity, such as the covered market on the square in front of the Abbey and the farmhouses.