Palazzo Ottolenghi e Museo del Risorgimento

On Corso Alfieri, Palazzo Ottolenghi is among Asti's prominent Baroque palaces. It preserves the Risorgimento collection and a reinforced-concrete air-raid shelter built in 1943.

Why it matters

The palace condenses two centuries of Asti history into a single facade. Born from the joining of two medieval houses, it was given its present Baroque grandeur in the mid-eighteenth century and takes its name from the family that bought it in 1851: count Zaccaria Ottolenghi, head of a prominent Jewish family, and his son Leonetto, the city's great philanthropist. The Risorgimento collection inside was conceived by Leonetto himself, commissioned for the celebratory exhibition of 1898 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Statuto Albertino. Portraits, battle paintings, flags, weapons and veterans' keepsakes make it one of Piedmont's more personal unification museums — assembled by a benefactor, not a state commission.

What to notice

Three things deserve close attention. First, the great staircase and the facade's arrangement of columns and windows, characteristic features of local Baroque design. Second, the Sala degli Ovali, one of the palace’s notable rooms. Third, the air-raid shelter reached from the Risorgimento rooms: built in 1943 for the offices of the Royal Prefecture, with reinforced concrete vaults about two metres thick and walls a metre thick, in two chambers of roughly thirty square metres each — space for about twenty people — fitted out today with panels and display cases on the city between the two world wars. The collection itself includes flags of the workers' mutual-aid societies, medals, coins and memorabilia donated by veterans or their heirs.

Context and history

The building stands on the ancient Via Maestra, today Corso Alfieri, the aristocratic spine of Asti. Until the mid-eighteenth century it belonged to the Ramelli di Celle family; in 1754 it passed to the Gabuti di Bestagno, who commissioned a radical transformation from the architect Benedetto Alfieri, a leading architect of Piedmontese Baroque. Zaccaria Ottolenghi acquired it in 1851. The family's benefactions reshaped Asti: Zaccaria financed the Teatro Alfieri, while Leonetto built the New Israelite Temple and the Liceo Dante Alighieri, commissioned monuments for the fiftieth anniversary of the Statuto Albertino and for King Umberto I, and donated Palazzo Alfieri to the city. The museum opened in 1898, was closed in 1984, and reopened at this site on 23 March 2012, following the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification.

The canvases at the museum's core were painted for the Risorgimento show held within the Esposizione Nazionale di Viticoltura, Enologia ed Arti Affini — Asti's great 1898 exhibition — so the collection was born, unusually, inside a wine-and-agriculture fair. The Risorgimento narrative it charts runs from the Astese Republic of 1797 to the capture of Rome in 1870, with the world wars added around it. The palace's museum career has been discontinuous — the 1984 closure put the collections into storage for nearly three decades before the 2012 reopening gave them this purpose-fitted home.