Chiesa Parrocchiale di San Giovanni Battista

Barbaresco's parish church gathers nearly a thousand years of village history under one baroque roof. Rebuilt between 1728 and 1730 on the site of a church documented in the early eleventh century, it preserves a marble high altar, an inlaid walnut choir of 1796, and frescoes commissioned by the parish in recent decades, dedicated to the village's patron saint.

Why it matters

This is the spiritual centre of Barbaresco and its most complete artistic interior. The Christian presence here is exceptionally old: a church already stood beside the castle before the year 1000, and a diploma of 1014 records it. The current building, opened for worship in 1730, carries the dedication to San Giovanni Battista, patron saint of the village, and its furnishings accumulate work from three centuries — baroque marbles, an eighteenth-century walnut choir, a baptismal font and ambo by a twentieth-century local sculptor, and a fresco cycle finished within living memory. The church's furnishings reflect several centuries of local artistic work.

What to notice

The high altar is executed in fine marbles to a design by Count Rangone of Montelupo, with a fresco of St John the Baptist behind it. To the left opens the chapel of the Madonna del Rosario, holding a wooden statue encircled by small panels of the rosary mysteries; to the right, the chapel of San Giuseppe displays a painting of the transit of the Virgin's spouse. Two choirs repay comparison: one built in 1850 by the firm Vittino of Centallo, the other an inlaid walnut choir dated 1796. The polychrome marble baptismal font bears a wooden sculpture by local artist Francesco Vacca, who also carved the ambo in 1992; a marble-framed image of the patron saint was placed in 1780.

Context and history

The church is documented in a diploma of 1014, while its present fabric reflects an eighteenth-century reconstruction. The parish commissioned the engineer Castelli to design the new church, which rose in 1728 and was opened for worship in 1730 — a solid baroque structure that was enriched steadily over the following decades. The bell tower followed in 1756, and the marble-framed icon of St John the Baptist in 1780. Interior decoration continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: at the wish of the townspeople and their parish priest Don Paolo Doglio, the interior was newly frescoed by the local artist Cavazza, adding a twentieth- and twenty-first-century layer to its interior. The sequence illustrates how a small Langhe parish repeatedly reinvested in its principal sacred space.