Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista

When Don Bosco decided the fast-growing streets south of the centre needed a church, he engaged one of Italy's leading revival architects and produced a basilica of Lombard Romanesque inspiration, its campanile, atrium and mosaic-fronted facade evoking the thirteenth century. San Giovanni Evangelista, called San Giovannino to distinguish it from the cathedral, remains an active Salesian parish.

Why it matters

The church grew directly out of Don Bosco's social mission. Turin in mid-century was absorbing migrant workers into new districts beyond Porta Nuova, and the Salesian founder responded with schools, oratories and, from 1878, a parish church on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II at the corner with Via Madama Cristina. The first stone was laid on 14 August 1878, and the building was finished and tested — together with its grand organ — by 1882, with solemn consecration following on 28 October.

The design belongs to Count Edoardo Arborio Mella of Vercelli, the leading Italian specialist in Gothic revival and author of a standard treatise on Gothic architecture, working with Carlo Maurizio Vigna. Mella controlled everything from the plan to the furnishings, and the result is a coherent essay in medieval style — basilical plan, tripartite facade with a porch and trifora, forty-five-metre bell tower, rib-vaulted ceilings with cubiform capitals and Lombard corbel tables — executed with nineteenth-century engineering.

What to notice

The Venetian-school mosaics, executed by the Società Musiva di Venezia, sit above a covered porch. The bell tower rises forty-five metres, and the church's roughly sixty-metre length reflects Don Bosco's ambitions.

The three-aisled interior divides into geometrically ordered bays, with a deambulatory wrapping the apse, a feature associated with French pilgrimage churches and rare in Turin. The decorative campaign filled the church with the work of the Salesian world's favourite artists: large encaustic and fresco cycles by Enrico Reffo, including the Crucifixion and the bishops of Asia Minor in the apse; vault frescoes conceived by Giuseppe Rollini; stained glass from the Pompeo Bertini workshop; and carpentry from the Salesian workshops of Valdocco. The organ by Giuseppe Bernasconi of Varese was commissioned for the 1882 acceptance testing, later modified and moved to the apse, and restored for the Don Bosco bicentennial in 2015–2016.

Context and history

The church belongs to the philanthropic generation of mid-nineteenth-century Turin — the era of Don Bosco, Murialdo, Cafasso, Cottolengo and Faà di Bruno — when explosive growth created social needs the city could not meet. Don Bosco's oratories in Valdocco were the model; San Giovanni Evangelista extended that pastoral network toward the new San Salvario quarter. Its nickname "San Giovannino", little John, distinguishes it from the cathedral of San Giovanni Battista at the heart of the city.

The parish's story continued into the twenty-first century with a new missionary chapter: the Salesian community developed a Filipino pastoral centre here — known as the centro filippino di San Giovannino — serving the city's large Filipino community.