Museo Civico Adriani

Cherasco keeps its civic memory in a seventeenth-century palace whose main hall once hosted the Piedmontese Senate during the siege of Turin. The Museo Civico "G.B. Adriani", founded on a Cheraschese historian’s donation, pairs local documents and antiquities with a coin collection that is the pride of the town's cultural life.

Why it matters

The museum, housed in Palazzo Gotti di Salerano, exists because of one man's bequest: Giovanni Battista Adriani, a distinguished Cheraschese historian of the nineteenth century, whose collections form the core of the display. Its numismatic cabinet includes Greek, Roman, Italian and foreign coins, alongside a medagliere. Two ground-floor rooms honour local figures: the versatile artist Sebastiano Taricco and Giuseppe Vayra, remembered as the first Bersagliere d'Italia. For a small town, this is an unusually layered civic collection.

What to notice

The palace portal and door mark its seventeenth-century entrance. Inside, several rooms retain frescoes by Sebastiano Taricco painted between 1672 and 1681, so the setting is itself part of the collection. The exhibits include documents of local and Piedmontese history, ancient objects such as statuettes, amphorae and cinerary urns, the coin cabinet, and the medagliere. In the main hall, the Piedmontese Senate held its regular sittings here during the siege of Turin in 1706, when the war of the Spanish Succession pushed the duchy's institutions out of its capital. On the ground floor, two rooms dedicated to Taricco and Vayra give the museum its most personal, Cherasco-centred note.

Context and history

Palazzo Gotti di Salerano is a seventeenth-century town house of a noble family, its decoration entrusted to Sebastiano Taricco, the painter and architect who dominates Cherasco's baroque. The 1706 senatorial episode marks the palace as a building of state-grade rooms. Adriani's donation formed the museum's core collection. Together palace and collections narrate Cherasco's self-image: a small town with a historian's memory and a senatorial past.