Piazza Galimberti

Piazza Galimberti is Cuneo's central square, nearly twenty-four thousand square metres of arcaded space on the site of the demolished medieval walls, framed by neoclassical porticoes.

Why it matters

The square is both the geometric and the social centre of Cuneo. After Napoleon's troops tore down the city walls at the start of the nineteenth century, the town expanded onto the open plateau with a regular grid of streets converging on this vast new piazza, first planned at half its eventual size and then doubled, so important was the silk trade to the town's growth. Renamed on 21 May 1945 for the Resistance hero Duccio Galimberti, it carries the city's modern history on its facades: the courthouse, the house of the Galimberti family and the memorial to the statesman Giuseppe Barbaroux. The arcades ringing the square belong to a network of about eight kilometres of porticoes strung through the centre.

What to notice

Piazza Galimberti covers roughly 24,000 square metres and is nicknamed "il salotto di Cuneo" (Cuneo's sitting room). Nineteenth-century porticoes run continuously around the square; ten flanking palaces use column bays and grouped terraces in a neoclassical rhythm. Palazzo Osasco houses the Museo Casa Galimberti; a facade plaque preserves Duccio Galimberti's 26 July 1943 speech. The courthouse and monument to jurist Giuseppe Barbaroux also face the square. The surrounding street grid links the newer town with the historic fortress quarter and cathedral.

Context and history

Until about 1800 Cuneo was a fortress town, squeezed inside ramparts on its wedge of land between the Gesso and Stura rivers. The Napoleonic demolition of the walls opened a new chapter: the city grew outwards on a checkerboard plan centred on the great square, which took shape over the first decades of the nineteenth century on ground that had been open space at the Barriera. It was known successively as Piazza Nizza, Piazza Nuova and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II before the Liberation name of 1945. Duccio Galimberti, the Cuneo lawyer who had organised the partisan bands of Italia Libera, had been killed by fascists in December 1944; giving the square his name the following spring bound the city's everyday meeting place to the memory of the Resistance. The expansion that began with the square continued through the nineteenth century and interwar years, and the piazza remains a central element of Cuneo's urban plan and civic memory.