Chiesa di Santa Croce

Tucked into the quarter of the old hospitals beside San Francesco, the church of Santa Croce is Cuneo's great confraternity foundation: an eighteenth-century interior of two joined elliptical rooms, hung with baroque canvases of the Miracles of the Cross, restored and reopened in December 2017.

Why it matters

The Confraternita di Santa Croce dates to the fourteenth century in Cuneo. Its members, dressed in white habits with hoods, prayed and cared for the sick and the poor, and from the sixteenth century they settled in the quarter of San Francesco, where their first chapel was frescoed in 1482 by Pietro Pocapaglia da Saluzzo — decoration still preserved. The church that replaced it is an original Baroque space in the city, and the hospital complex built around it served Cuneo until the 1960s. The church reopened in December 2017 after restoration.

What to notice

• The plan: two ellipses joined by the presbytery, designed by Antonio Bertola

with the site works directed from 1709 by Francesco Gallo, who modified the facade; the building was completed in 1715. The linked ovals give the interior an unusually fluid, processional character.

• The cycle of fourteen large canvases painted in 1626 by Giulio and Giovanni

Battista Bruno on the Miracles of the Cross, commissioned by the noble families affiliated to the brotherhood and brought from the old church — the pictorial core of the confraternity's devotion.

• The decorated surfaces: faux architecture by Pietro Antonio Pozzi, stuccoes by

Domenico Beltramelli and frescoes by Francesco Gaggini, layers that turn the plaster into a textbook of eighteenth-century ornament.

• The mid-eighteenth-century processional group of Christ carrying the cross, attributed to Giuseppe Maria and Stefano Maria Clemente, reflects the brotherhood's ritual tradition.
• Older treasures: a fifteenth-century chair linked to Saint Bernardino's visit

to Cuneo in 1418, a canvas of the Invenzione della croce by Giuseppe Galeotti from the 1760s, works by Alessandro Trono and by Guglielmo Caccia known as il Moncalvo, and a group of fifteenth-century crucifixes.

Context and history

The brotherhood's move into the San Francesco quarter in the sixteenth century fixed its home for the next four centuries. Between 1732 and 1876 the great hospital complex of Santa Croce rose around the church, able to house about fifty people — more a shelter than a clinic by modern standards — and it remained in service until the hospital transferred to new premises near the railway station in the 1960s. The church itself had been rebuilt earlier: the design by Antonio Bertola was taken forward from 1709 under Francesco Gallo and finished in 1715. After the hospital closed, the complex entered a long period of uncertainty until restoration and safety works allowed the church to reopen in December 2017. The former hospital building has since been associated with the city's library plans, extending the quarter's civic history.