Chiesa di Santa Maria Nuova

Named "new" a thousand years ago to distinguish it from the older cathedral, Santa Maria Nuova is a former abbey church that still performs a public role each September, when the Palio's horse and jockey are blessed before its Madonna del Grifone icon.

Why it matters

The name "Santa Maria Nuova" distinguished the church from the city's older cathedral and another church of Santa Maria. Raised to an abbey, it was governed first by Augustinians and then, from 1472, by the Lateran Regular Canons, and its prestige shows in the monastic complex around it, including a cloister begun in monumental form in 1591. Inside hangs one of the key paintings of Renaissance Piedmont: the altarpiece of the Madonna enthroned with saints by Gandolfino da Roreto, Asti's foremost early Renaissance painter. It offers depth that belies its modest facade.

What to notice

The facade is deliberately plain, so let the interior do the work. The nave runs to a polygonal apse flanked by six side chapels, under green groin vaults with ogival ribs — an unexpected colour note among Asti's interiors. In the apse stands the altarpiece of 1496 by Gandolfino da Roreto, the Madonna in throne with saints Margaret, Eulalia, Augustine and Secundus and the Risen Christ above; A second Gandolfino panel, the Nativity, is set above the font. Among the furnishings, find the great central lectern with its French influence, described as unique in Piedmont, and the wooden choir of 1572. In a side chapel hangs the icon of the Madonna del Grifone painted by the Asti artist Carlo Carosso and given by the borgo's Palio committee — the image before which the horse and jockey of the Santa Maria Nuova district are blessed in the days before the race each September.

Context and history

The church's story runs from the eleventh-century record through a priory granted to the Mortara canons in 1132, to the later abbacy under Augustinians and the transfer to the Lateran canons by Pope Sixtus IV in 1472. The present building grew to its current form across the late medieval and baroque centuries: large rectangular windows and the upper part of the Romanesque bell tower were remade in the eighteenth century, and later restorations reshaped the church while preserving sixteenth-century wooden furnishings. The monastery's fortunes tracked Piedmont's upheavals — its goods were auctioned in 1798 to fund an army, a painting by Subleyras seized by Napoleon's government ended in the Louvre, and in 1804 the monastery became the city hospital. The church's later history includes the city's Palio tradition: each September the horse and jockey of the Santa Maria Nuova district are blessed before the race.