Chiesa di San Rocco

Behind a plain brick facade in the borgo that takes its name, Asti's church of San Rocco preserves the world of the Battuti Verdi, the green-cloaked confraternity whose horse once won the Palio. Its altar, built from marbles gathered across half of Italy, is the interior's quiet showpiece.

Why it matters

This is the church built for the Confraternita di San Rocco, known as the Battuti Verdi, whose members wore cream robes with green belts — the colours in which the borgo San Martino–San Rocco still races in the Palio di Asti. The confraternity, which had gathered first in the Collegiata di San Secondo, moved into its own small church in 1637 and, as the district of silk-spinners grew, commissioned the present building, consecrated around 1720 to a design by the engineer Carlo Giulio Quadri. The church's history is a cross-section of Piedmont's troubled eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — French prisoners, Austrian requisitions, floods — and its history reflects the role of confraternity districts in Asti's civic life.

What to notice

The exterior is deliberately austere: facing brick, little ornament, and above the portal a frame with a fresco of two flying angels where an earlier lunette once sat. Step inside and the register changes. The nave is lined by fluted rectangular columns with Corinthian capitals, side chapels open off the aisle, and a dome rises near the head of the nave. The main altar is the essential stop: Francesco Ferrari of Locarno assembled it in 1762 from an extraordinary range of polychrome marbles — Bardiglio, brocatello, and stones from Verona, Sicily and Val Camonica — so that the whole peninsula appears in a single furnishing. Look also for the life-size wooden Christ at the Column by Carlo Giuseppe Plura from the 1720s, restored in 2008, a seventeenth-century wooden statue of Saint Rocco that may be the confraternity's earliest image of its patron, and a nineteenth-century Saint Apollonia attributed to a young Michelangelo Pittatore.

Context and history

The confraternity's move to the contrada dei filanti — the district of silk workers — in 1637 marks the growth of the borgo beyond the old San Martino gate, beside whose remains the new church rose. The building's later history reads like a local chronicle of hard times: in 1793 it housed French soldiers taken prisoner; in 1800 Austrian troops requisitioned it and dismantled the organ, which was reassembled only in 1814 after restorations begun in 1803. Floods of 1943 and 1994 damaged the church, with repairs following in 1945 and 1951 — the later one recorded by an inscription. Through all of it the Palio connection held: the Battuti Verdi won the race twelve times, and the confraternity's colours remain those of the district's entry today. The church preserves the artistic interior and institutional memory of one of Asti's historic brotherhoods.