Museo Casa Galimberti

On the second floor of palazzo Osasco, west of Piazza Galimberti, the apartment and professional study of one of Cuneo's leading families have been kept as they were. A bourgeois interior of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries doubles as a memorial: Duccio Galimberti, who lived and worked in these rooms before helping to launch the Piedmontese Resistance.

Why it matters

Museo Casa Galimberti is both a house museum and a place of civic memory. The study and residence were used first by the lawyer Tancredi Galimberti senior and then by his son, known as Duccio, the anti-fascist lawyer who after the armistice of 1943 went into the Cuneo mountains and gave life — with Dante Livio Bianco and other companions — to the partisan band Italia Libera, an early Giustizia e Libertà formation in the Cuneese, before being captured and killed by fascists in December 1944. The house became a museum through the testamentary bequest of Duccio's brother Carlo Enrico in 1974, and it now belongs to the city's civic museum network. Few places in Cuneo connect the town's everyday history — its professional classes, its furnishings, its books — so directly to the national story of the Resistenza.

What to notice

• The study and family rooms preserve their original character, showing how a Cuneo family of lawyers lived between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Original door signs—"Fam. Galimberti" and "Avv. Tancredi Galimberti"—mark the house and studio.
• The family library of about 20,000 nineteenth- and early twentieth-century volumes spans legal, literary, scientific and artistic subjects; the family archive is preserved alongside it.
• Paintings by Lorenzo Delleani, Giacomo Grosso and Matteo Olivero and sculpture

by Leonardo Bistolfi and Henri Godet, showing the family's ties to Piedmontese art of the period.

• Documents, objects and family mementoes that trace the Galimberti household

from professional life into anti-fascist commitment.

• The link to the square below runs through a commemorative plaque: it carries

Duccio Galimberti's speech of 26 July 1943, delivered as fascism fell, and in May 1945 the square itself took his name.

Context and history

The Galimberti were part of the educated bourgeoisie that shaped modern Cuneo. Tancredi Galimberti senior practised law from this apartment in palazzo Osasco, and his son followed him to the bar before turning to open opposition to the fascist regime. After 8 September 1943 Duccio Galimberti helped organise armed resistance in the Cuneo mountains — on 11 September twelve men, Duccio and Dante Livio Bianco among them, went up to the Madonna del Colletto and founded the Italia Libera band — an experience documented in the museum's materials alongside the family's own papers. Captured in Turin in November 1944, he was interrogated and tortured in Cuneo and shot on 3 December 1944 on the road towards Centallo; a few days later the Piedmontese Liberation Committee proclaimed him a National Hero. The following spring, with liberation, the great square outside was given the name it still carries.

Carlo Enrico Galimberti's 1974 bequest established the museum and preserved the flat as a house museum. It is part of Cuneo's civic museum network.