Cappella della Madonna di Loreto

Where the road from La Morra runs toward Verduno, a stone-and-brick chapel has watched over the vineyards since the mid-eighteenth century. The Cappella della Madonna di Loreto is a rural chapel built in 1750 over an older votive pillar, with frescoes added in 1817 and a portico in 1834.

Why it matters

This chapel preserves the older devotional layer of the La Morra countryside, beneath even its own walls. The 1750 chapel was raised over a votive pillar of the fifteenth century, a tabernacle-like structure where travellers and field workers paused to pray; the pillar itself survives inside the building as a wall painting of the Virgin with Child, now set in the apse. That continuity, a fifteenth-century image sheltered by an eighteenth-century church and frescoed again in the nineteenth, makes the chapel a compact history of popular faith in the Langhe. It also anchors the hamlet of Loreto, giving the locality its name and its identity within the wine landscape that surrounds it.

What to notice

The 1834 portico shelters the entrance to the rectangular single nave, built of stone and brick. Inside, the late-medieval Madonna and Child from the old pillar is set in the apse, while Giovanni Vassalli's 1817 fresco cycle covers the walls.

Context and history

The chapel's history spans four centuries. In 1817 Giovanni Vassalli, a son of the parish, painted the fresco cycle that still decorates the interior. In 1834 the portico was added, giving field labourers and passers-by a sheltered place before the altar and protecting the wall paintings from weather. Like the nearby Cappella del Barolo, it belongs to La Morra's network of rural chapels.