Chiesa di San Giovanni

On the square named for the Roman emperor born here, San Giovanni collects the painted inheritance of Alba's demolished churches: a Gothic-era Madonna by Barnaba da Modena, panels by Gandolfino da Roretto, an Adoration by Macrino d'Alba. The church serves as the town's gallery of sacred art.

Why it matters

Alba's own parish describes San Giovanni Battista as the oldest church in the city after the cathedral and the vanished Santa Maria del Ponte, and medieval records cite it as a service church of the cathedral. Its deeper value today is the collection: paintings recovered after the Napoleonic suppressions and later restorations from churches that no longer exist were gathered here, turning a modest parish interior into what the parish itself calls a pinacoteca of sacred art in the heart of Alba. The collection brings together important works of Piedmontese painting from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

What to notice

• Fresco fragments of about 1320 on the counter-facade: kneeling female

figures presented to Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, the oldest works in the building.

• Barnaba da Modena's Madonna del latte, dated 1377, a rare signed-generation

Gothic panel outside the big museums.

• Five tempera panels of 1493 by Gandolfino da Roretto, survivors of a larger

polyptych — the diocesan catalogue records the panels as now in Turin's Galleria Sabauda — and Macrino d'Alba's Adorazione del Bambino of 1508.

• Giovanni Antonio Molineri's seventeenth-century canvases of the Baptism of

Jesus and the Madonna del Carmine, alongside a painting in the orbit of Guglielmo Caccia, il Moncalvo.

• The carved wooden seat of 1429 by the Pavia woodcarver Urbanino da Surso,

which came here from the church of San Francesco together with several panels.

Context and history

The church stands beside the ancient brichet, the rampart that once led to the drawbridge of Alba's castle, and gave its name to one of the city's medieval districts. Granted in 1556 to the Augustinian fathers, it gained a portico and a clock in the eighteenth century and accumulated altars and paintings. The friars left during the Napoleonic period and the building served as a warehouse; with the Restoration, from 1819, the parish priest Michele Travaglio resumed pastoral care and began recovering works from demolished churches — the founding act of the present collection. Nineteenth- century campaigns touched the choir and facade, and in 1884 the hall was raised and given the current facade and a coffered ceiling. Recent decades have brought presbytery reordering, new flooring and restorations of church and rectory.