Museo Diocesano San Sebastiano

In Contrada Mondovì, among the most ancient lanes of Cuneo, a former confraternity oratory has been turned into the city's museum of diocesan art. Opened in 2012, the Museo Diocesano San Sebastiano arranges eight centuries of devotion, painting and precious objects through a sequence of themed rooms, and it has become an unusually visitor-friendly small museum in southern Piedmont.

Why it matters

The museum preserves and displays the artistic patrimony of the diocese of Cuneo-Fossano in the very quarter where the city began. Its building is itself the main exhibit: the complex of the confraternity of San Sebastiano grew around a chapel dedicated to Saint James with an attached hospital, documented from the thirteenth century, and the oratory was rebuilt and re-titled to the Santi Giacomo e Sebastiano after the war events of the sixteenth century. Since 2012 the museum's route — polveriera, reliquary chapel, Saint James hall, Saint Sebastian hall and rooms devoted to the nineteenth century, ephemeral apparatus and the diocese itself — narrates "eight centuries of history in the heart of the city". It continues traditions associated with the cathedral's treasury.

What to notice

• The oratory church of San Sebastiano, integrated into the itinerary since

September 2013, with its interior frescoes of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

• The Cappella delle Reliquie, where the diocese keeps its relics, and the Sala

San Giacomo, which recalls the older dedication of the site and its hospital function.

• The Sala della Madonna del Carmine and the Sala Ottocento, tracing devotion

and diocesan art into the modern age.

• The Sala Apparati Effimeri, devoted to the temporary structures — festival

machines, processional and liturgical apparatus — with which cities of the old regime celebrated.

• The museum's interpretation includes tools designed for visitors with intellectual, hearing, visual and mobility disabilities, as well as family-oriented educational activities.

Context and history

Contrada Mondovì preserves the oldest urban fabric of Cuneo, near the former Contrada Maestra, today's Via Roma. The confraternity that built the San Sebastiano complex belonged to the network of lay brotherhoods that ran charity in the city; their chapel of Saint James with its hospital is documented from the thirteenth century, and after the destructions tied to the war of 1557 the oratory was rebuilt — the choir raised by the masters Fontana and Scala in 1595, the facade following in 1621 — and consecrated in 1625, the older Saint James devotion joined by that of Saint Sebastian. Inside, Giovanni Antonio Molineri's altarpiece of Christ crucified between Saints James and Sebastian (1626) and his Evangelist frescoes (1628) remain in place, Alessandro Trono's "Gloria di San Sebastiano" (1743) crowns the presbytery, the nave took its neoclassical dress in the nineteenth century and the neomedieval bell tower was raised in 1897 to designs of the Cuneo engineer Carlo Ponzo. The confraternity's decline left the complex available for a new civic purpose, and the diocese, supported by its Fondazione and cultural institutions, restored it as a museum, inaugurated in 2012; the church joined the visitor route a year later. The museum also serves as a hub of the Museo Diffuso Cuneese network, which links the city's dispersed heritage sites.