Cappella di Sant'Antonio Abate

In the Berri hamlet of La Morra, an eighteenth-century chapel keeps its painted facade safe under a sheltering portico. The Cappella di Sant'Antonio Abate has mural paintings by local artist Giovanni Savio, stucco work dating to 1745 and an 1858 altarpiece that repeats the facade's figures.

Why it matters

Rural chapels like this one explain how the Langhe was inhabited before wine tourism: small buildings raised by farming communities at crossroads and hamlets, serving the agricultural calendar and the saints who protected it. Sant'Antonio Abate was precisely such a patron, invoked for animals and against fire and disease, which is why his chapel stands in a farming settlement like Berri rather than at the village centre. The chapel's decorative history includes a portico built to shield its mural paintings, stucco cornices decorated as early as 1745, an altar painting from 1858, and early twentieth-century murals by a painter of the township itself. It is a small structure, but a legible one, where patronage, art and country life can still be read together.

What to notice

The portico was constructed specifically to protect the facade's mural paintings. The murals show the Madonna with Child flanked by Saint Anthony Abate and Saint Philip, painted by Giovanni Savio of La Morra in the first half of the twentieth century, working with deliberate reference to the older altarpiece. The 1858 altarpiece repeats the same three figures, linking altar painting with the exterior wall imagery. The stucco work on the cornice, dated by the municipality to 1745, frames the interior with the restrained elegance that rural Piedmontese workshops brought even to country buildings.

Context and history

The chapel belongs to the eighteenth century, the great period of rural chapel building across the Barolo hills, when confraternities and farming families competed to adorn even the smallest settlements. Berri, one of the hamlets under the commune of La Morra, received its chapel in that wave, with the stucco cornice already in place by 1745. The altarpiece followed a century later, in 1858, depicting the same figures that would later appear on the facade. Giovanni Savio, born in 1863 and active into the mid twentieth century, executed the exterior murals in the first half of the 1900s, modelling them on the altar painting, a practice that kept iconography consistent across generations. The chapel belongs to La Morra's heritage of rural chapels.