Palazzo Mazzetti

Palazzo Mazzetti is Asti's Baroque theatre of prestige — a palace built to advertise one of the city's richest families, receiving royal exiles, kings and Napoleon in its day, and now houses the civic museum and picture gallery, with paintings, oriental artefacts and material related to the Risorgimento.

Why it matters

Of all the palaces Asti's merchant aristocracy raised, Palazzo Mazzetti is the one you can walk through in full. The Mazzetti family ranked for centuries among the city's wealthiest and most influential, and in the 17th century the marchese Giulio Cesare II enlarged the building precisely as a statement of social arrival — the family name carved into the cityscape. The palace went on to lodge Giacomo Stuart III in 1717, Carlo Emanuele III of Savoy in 1727 and Napoleon I in 1805, a guest list few provincial Italian houses can match. Since 1887 its rooms have held civic collections, making the palace one of Asti's notable secular interiors and an important survey of the city's art.

What to notice

Read the palace as a building in three campaigns. The first, running until the second quarter of the 18th century, produced the intimate jewels of the piano nobile: the Sala dell'Alcova, the Sala dello Zodiaco and the gallery of 1730 with its painted enfilade — its Alcova vault, dated 1684, is the work of the Lugano stucco masters who bring Italian lake-country craft into the Piedmontese interior. The second campaign of 1751–52 belongs to Benedetto Alfieri — the architect uncle of the poet — who added the grand Scalone and the Salone d'Onore, their stuccoes executed by masters from the Lugano lake region. The third is 20th-century: after the Cassa di Risparmio di Asti bought the palace in 1937, restorers and decorators including Giuseppe Manzone and Ottavio Baussano reworked interiors for institutional use.

Then read the collection. On the picture-gallery walls, look for the Incoronazione della Vergine by the Maestro di San Martino Alfieri (1503–04), the Martirio di San Bartolomeo by Giovan Battista Pittoni (after 1735), Giacomo Grosso's La femme (1895) and Lorenzo Delleani's Pellegrinaggio ad Oropa (1895). The star curiosities are the microscultures of Giuseppe Maria Bonzanigo — ivory-scale carvings including Le Tre Grazie — and the oriental collection formed by Admiral Guglielminetti in 1920, alongside the antique textiles of the Gerbo collection. Twentieth-century painting appears too, with works by Renato Guttuso, Mattia Moreni, Arturo Carmassi and Corrado Cagli.

Context and history

The civic museum here began modestly: a single archaeological room in 1887, at the height of 19th-century local patriotism. It grew by gift and by chapter — donations from the painter Michelangelo Pittatore in 1902; a Risorgimento section of 1910–11 built around canvases commissioned by Leonetto Ottolenghi; the Admiral Guglielminetti oriental collection in 1920; the Bonzanigo microsculptures entering in the 1930s; and, from 1955, contemporary art. That accumulation produced exactly the range visible today: old masters and Ottocento landscapes, eastern artefacts, uniforms and memory of the Risorgimento, and modern painting under one roof.

The palace's institutional role complements its collections. Palazzo Mazzetti is the headquarters of the Fondazione Asti Musei; the Risorgimento museum occupies the ground floor, while collections extend through the piano nobile. Temporary exhibitions change over time alongside the permanent collection.