Cattedrale di San Lorenzo

The mother church of Alba stands where the Roman forum once lay, and its brick tower still anchors the skyline of the Langhe capital. Inside, a late-medieval gothic shell, a nineteenth-century restoration and a polychrome marble altar layer centuries of piety over the buried city — the Duomo anchors Alba's historic centre.

Why it matters

San Lorenzo is the cathedral of the Diocese of Alba and the city's principal church, reflecting its religious, civic and musical history. Its dedication to the deacon-martyr Lawrence goes back a very long way: the site occupies the eastern sector of the forum of Roman Alba Pompeia, and powerful Roman wall structures have emerged around and beneath the building. The present appearance is essentially late-fifteenth-century gothic, filtered through a careful nineteenth-century restoration, and it remains a living parish.

What to notice

• The brick facade, reworked in the nineteenth century and crowned with a rose

window and statues; its sobriety is typical of the Langhe, where terracotta, not stone, is the building material.

• The interior decoration that deliberately echoes the Duomo of Chieri:

horizontal two-tone banding, lobed pilasters and blue cross vaults.

• The presbytery ensemble: a carved wooden choir, a high altar in polychrome

marble, and an altarpiece of Saint Lawrence.

• The large Lingiardi organ of 1876 on the counter-facade, an important part of the town's musical heritage.
• The floor level of the crypt zone, where the Diocesan Museum (MUDI) manages

a late-Roman and early-medieval archaeological area — the stratigraphy of Alba in a single room.

Context and history

A church stood here by the early Middle Ages; the main medieval campaign rebuilt it in the gothic-lombard manner during the closing decades of the fifteenth century, the era when Alba's bishop and ruling families were reshaping the town. The vault of the nave collapsed after the earthquake of 1652 and was subsequently rebuilt, with additional side chapels added. The decisive modern intervention came from the architect Edoardo Arborio Mella, a Vercellese specialist in gothic revival, whose 1867–1872 restoration gave the cathedral its current facade; the Romanesque bell tower is itself a medieval structure raised around an even earlier tower. The wooden choir dates to 1512, and the picture collection includes canvases attributed in the catalogue of the Beppe Fenoglio Study Centre to Claude-François Beaumont and to local painters such as Cuniberti, Morgari and Reffo. The archaeological zone under the floor is presented together with the Diocesan Museum .