Piazza della Libertà

Piazza della Libertà is the civic heart of Alessandria, a broad rectangular square where the city's medieval beginnings, 18th-century elegance and 20th-century architecture meet. Around it stand the Palatium Vetus, Palazzo Ghilini, the town hall and the municipal art rooms.

Why it matters

Piazza della Libertà has been Alessandria's principal public space since the Middle Ages, when it was known as the Platea Maior and the first cathedral of San Pietro stood beside the young commune. The cathedral's demolition in 1803 left an open space that was gradually reshaped into today's tree-lined rectangle. Its surrounding buildings span several centuries: the twelfth-century Palatium Vetus, Palazzo Ghilini, an eighteenth-century noble residence now hosting the Prefecture, a neoclassical town hall and a rationalist post office decorated by a Futurist painter.

What to notice

The Palatium Vetus, a twelfth-century communal palace, recalls Alessandria's foundation as a league town and later served as the governor's residence; it now houses the civic library. Palazzo Ghilini, begun in 1732 to designs associated with Benedetto Alfieri, represents Piedmontese Settecento architecture. The town hall closes the south side, while the Post Office palace of 1939–41 carries a mosaic by Gino Severini. The square's open centre marks the former site of the Romanesque-Gothic cathedral, and a monument commemorates Alessandria-born statesman Urbano Rattazzi.

Context and history

The square's story begins with the city itself, founded in the 12th century. A first cathedral of San Pietro, built between about 1170 and 1175 on the southern edge of the Platea Maior, proved too small and was replaced from 1228 by a larger cathedral in the Gothic-Lombard manner, completed at the end of that century; the medieval cathedral that resulted dominated the space for more than six hundred years. The turning point came with Napoleon: in 1803 the medieval cathedral was demolished for military reasons, a decision tied to the transformation of Alessandria into a major fortress town. The 19th century then gave the square its present shape as a spacious, tree-edged rectangle, with new civic buildings filling its sides. The town hall on the south side was begun in 1772 to designs by Giuseppe Caselli and completed in 1828, bridging the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The 20th century added the Post and Telegraph palace, built between 1939 and 1941 and decorated with Severini's mosaic. The name itself, "Piazza della Libertà", belongs to the Risorgimento vocabulary that swept Italian squares after unification, and it suits a city whose identity was forged in communal self-assertion and later in the struggle for national independence.