Chiesa di Santa Maria Maddalena

On Alba's main street stands one of the finest statements of Piedmontese baroque: a church whose undulating brick facade, left deliberately unfinished, curves like a piece of Turin transplanted to the Langhe. Designed by Bernardo Antonio Vittone, one of the leading architects of Piedmontese baroque, it wraps an elliptical nave around the memory of a Savoy princess turned Dominican nun.

Why it matters

Santa Maria Maddalena is the high point of the eighteenth-century rebuilding of Alba and one of the key works of Bernardo Antonio Vittone, the architect who carried Guarini's and Juvarra's lessons into the small towns of Piedmont. Commissioned by Count Carlo Giacinto Roero, it rises on the site of a convent founded in the fifteenth century by the Beata Margherita di Savoia, whose relics rest here and whose triple-arrow emblem still marks the portal. The building is also a lesson in urban ethics: its facade was never clad because the patrons refused to take public space from the narrow main street.

What to notice

• The sinuous brick facade, with exposed bonding courses and a movement that

invites comparison with Palazzo Carignano in Turin — and the deliberate incompleteness of its outer cladding, abandoned to avoid narrowing the street.

• The elliptical plan inscribed in a rectangle: eight Corinthian columns

alternating with pilasters around the nave, under an oval dome lit by a lantern.

• The illusionistic vault paintings by Michele Antonio Milocco (1747–1750),

glorifying the Beata Margherita, the Dominican order and the House of Savoy.

• The altar of the Beata Margherita, with the silver urn made in 1840 by the

Turin goldsmith Pietro Borrani — it replaced a wooden urn commissioned under Vittorio Amedeo II, on Queen Maria Cristina's wish — over a grated opening that holds her relics; she had been named co-patroness of Alba in 1692.

• The choir behind the presbytery: a trapezoidal room with 48 walnut stalls,

carved armrests and inlaid backs, its vault painted in 1734 by Giacomo Rapa — and used today for concerts and exhibitions.

Context and history

In the 1440s Margherita di Savoia-Acaia, widowed marchioness of Monferrato and daughter of a Savoy lord, embraced the Dominican rule in Alba and founded here a convent and church, of which she became the first abbess; VisitAlba records the foundation of the convent in 1442, and heritage catalogues the building of her church in 1446, inheriting the site of a 1251 church of the Umiliati. Venerated as beata after her death in 1464 and buried in the convent church, she remained the focus of civic devotion. In the eighteenth century Count Carlo Giacinto Roero commissioned Vittone to rebuild; works ran from the choir (1733–1734) to the completion recorded in 1749 on the cartouches. The high altar's upper structure — twisted columns and the Savoy arms — was executed in 1689–1691 for the earlier altar and reassembled by Vittone; the altarpiece of the Maddalena is Giovanni Battista Biscarra's of 1825. The complex became city property with the convent's suppression and now belongs to the Cortile della Maddalena cultural citadel.