Cappella del Barolo (Cappella della Madonna delle Grazie)

A small vineyard chapel stands on Brunate hill above La Morra. Built in 1914 and never consecrated, later a farm shed, it was transformed in 1999 into a total artwork by Sol LeWitt on the outside and David Tremlett within, now part of the Ceretto family's estate.

Why it matters

The Cappella del Barolo brings together the religious history of the Langhe countryside, Barolo winegrowing and late-twentieth-century contemporary art. The municipality documents it among the township's rural chapels as a building of 1914, raised beside a votive pillar frescoed by the local painter Giovanni Savio. When the Ceretto family bought land in the Brunate vineyard, the little church stood derelict, pressed into service as a farm shed. David Tremlett, spending a summer in the Langhe, imagined its rebirth and brought in his friend Sol LeWitt; their completed work opened in 1999. What had been a forgotten outbuilding became an icon, its multiplied colours now inseparable from the image of the Barolo hills.

What to notice

The exterior is Sol LeWitt's: broad geometric fields of colour set against the vine rows. David Tremlett's interior uses earth tones and hand-applied textures. Municipal records state that the chapel was never consecrated and that the frescoed votive pillar beside which it was built was demolished at the end of the twentieth century. The work combines contemporary art with traces of its agricultural past.

Context and history

The sequence of dates is unusually well documented. In 1914 the chapel was constructed beside Savio's frescoed pilone, serving growers who worked the Brunate slope. In 1970 the Ceretto family acquired parcels of the Brunate vineyard, chapel included, by then in ruins and reportedly able to contain a tractor. In the 1990s Tremlett, an English artist long associated with wall drawings, proposed its transformation and involved Sol LeWitt, the American master of conceptual and geometric art; the restoration and decoration were completed in 1999. The Ceretto estate describes the chapel as dedicated to a "cult of joy," a phrase that contrasts with the building's period of decay. The work forms part of contemporary art history in Piedmont.