Chiesa dei Santi Cosma e Damiano

Along Alba's historic main street a parish church honours the two physician saints Cosmas and Damian. Documented by the twelfth century and raised over Roman walling, it was rebuilt from the foundations in the 1760s and given a bell tower whose sober lines already announce neoclassicism — a quiet counterpoint to the baroque theatrics elsewhere in town.

Why it matters

The church condenses the whole layering of Alba in one parish building. Its floor rests on remnants of Roman walls and pavements; medieval records show it functioning as civic space, with thirteenth-century sources mentioning city council meetings held "in ecclesia sancti damiani"; and its eighteenth-century reconstruction belongs to the same wave of patrician patronage that reshaped the Maddalena and San Giuseppe. On via Vittorio Emanuele, the street Albesi still call la via Maestra, it marks the commercial spine of the medieval and modern city.

What to notice

• Roman walling and pavement remains beneath the church floor.
• The bell tower of 1780–1786, designed by Carlo Emanuele Rangone: a

projecting crowning cornice, pilaster strips and round oculi — forms that contemporaries would have read as strikingly modern and proto-neoclassical.

• The facade remodelled in 1893 by the Genoese engineer Adriano Craffonara,

with two superimposed orders of Corinthian pilasters that partly covered the original exposed-brick baroque front.

• The main altarpiece of 1761 by Claudio Beaumont, showing the titular

physician saints with an angel and the Annunciation image.

• The vault paintings of 1877, restored in 1921 by Fedele Finati, and an

eighteenth-century altarpiece attributed to Pietro Paolo Operti on the altar of Sant'Anna.

Context and history

Documented from the twelfth century — a record of 1163 notes a cathedral cantor invested with the parish — the church is among the oldest attested places of worship in Alba after the cathedral itself. The decision to rebuild came with the legacy of Canon Giuseppe Maria Caratti, whose 1759 will funded a complete reconstruction from the foundations; work proceeded in 1760–1762 to a design by the architect and count Carlo Francesco Rangone di Montelupo. His son Carlo Emanuele Rangone designed the bell tower built between 1780 and 1786, and the elder Rangone's will of 1788 left money for its roofing. In 1820 the parish gained full independence from the cathedral chapter by decree of Bishop Giovanni Antonio Nicola. A later organ of 1926 by Natale Balbiani e figli completes the furnishings.