Chiesa della Confraternita della Santissima Trinità e Sant'Evasio

On Via Cavour, beside the memory of an old hospital, stands the church of the Battuti Rossi confraternity. Its Baroque facade and frescoed vault are linked to the Palio di Asti; a 1677 painting is considered the earliest known image of the city's horse race.

Why it matters

This is the seat of the Confraternita dei Battuti Rossi, a lay brotherhood documented before 1570. The church beside the former hospital of Sant'Evasio shows successive building phases — earlier fabric, alterations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a Baroque refashioning — and its interior preserves one of the most complete fresco cycles in the city. Its bond with the Palio di Asti is exceptional: the confraternity raced from at least 1648 and won eight times, and the 1677 ex-voto preserved here is considered the oldest known iconographic depiction of the palio alla lunga, the long straight race run through the streets.

What to notice

The facade, reworked in the mid-eighteenth century to a design by Giovanni Antonio Guggia and altered again about a century later by the architect Colla, now ends in a triangular tympanum carrying a rayed dove, emblem of the Trinity; drawings of an earlier phase show a curvilinear gable, and the niches beside the portal once held two putti with torches. Inside, a single nave with a barrel vault opens into two side chapels. The vault and walls were frescoed in the mid-eighteenth century by the Milocco brothers with scenes drawn from scripture: the baptism of Christ, the Transfiguration, Moses striking water from the rock, Abraham with the three angels, the sacrifice of Isaac and the bronze serpent. The 1677 ex-voto depicts the race; tradition links its contested finish, in which a messenger touches the palio to a riderless horse, to the rule that the prize belongs to the horse alone.

Context and history

The Battuti Rossi ran the neighbouring hospital of Sant'Evasio and a chapel of Santa Maria Vergine della Neve outside the walls, making this church the centre of a charitable as well as a devotional operation. The building grew from a medieval structure through successive campaigns; the baroque phase of 1755–1760 gave the church the facade and interior character it keeps today, and further retouching followed in the nineteenth century. The confraternity's Palio record is part of the city's institutional memory: its first documented entry came in 1648, its eight victories feed the district's pride, and the 1677 ex-voto doubles as a document of how the medieval race was actually run. The interior adds quieter layers: the main altar by the Pelegatta brothers of Casale Monferrato, a choir by Giuseppe Giacinto Salario financed by selling the old 1688 choir to Magliano Alfieri — together with two putti acquired by the Cistercians of the Consolata — and a processional Redeemer statue attributed to Bonzanigo. The church preserves the history of the confraternity and its civic role.