Chiesa della Madonna delle Grazie

On the green ramparts at the edge of Cherasco stands the Madonnina, an octagonal church of 1762 built to give a dignified home to a venerated thirteenth-century fresco. Its walls of ex-votos — 125 of them, spanning 1726 to 1927 — record two centuries of ordinary people asking and giving thanks.

Why it matters

The church of the Madonna delle Grazie, known locally as the Madonnina, shows how a roadside pilgrimage shrine could grow into architecture. The official portal records that in 1762 an octagonal church was erected on a design by Nicola Vercellone to house an ancient pilone — a wayside pillar of the thirteenth century — bearing a revered fresco of the Madonna, Jesus and Saint John. Rather than demolishing the object of devotion, the town wrapped a building around it. The result is both an elegant piece of eighteenth-century geometry and a document of popular faith.

What to notice

The plan is the first thing: a true octagon, which gives the interior an unusual concentrated, almost centripetal space compared with the nave churches of the centre. At its heart, look for the old pilone with its fresco of the Madonna with Jesus and San Giovanni — the reason everything else exists. The official description then points to a "Crocifissione" painted in molinerian tones — the manner of Giovanni Antonio Molineri, the Caravaggesque painter whose circle worked across this corner of Piedmont — and two canvases by Taricco and the Operti. The ex-voto collection comprises 125 votive pictures covering the period 1726–1927, a running visual archive of accidents, illnesses and escapes that the people of Cherasco and the countryside attributed to the Madonna.

Context and history

The church stands on the bastions — the star-shaped defences designed in 1610 by Ascanio Vittozzi and demilitarised in the nineteenth century, whose walkways now form the town's green ring. The Madonnina forms part of the historic landscape of the town's demilitarised ramparts. The thirteenth-century fresco it protects predates the town's baroque golden age by four centuries, and the 1762 rebuilding by Vercellone belongs to the late flourishing of Marian devotion in the Cherasco area, contemporaneous with the sanctuary role developing at the Madonna del Popolo. The ex-votos' long span, from 1726 into the twentieth century, shows the shrine stayed alive well after its architectural moment, cared for by generations with little interest in style and every interest in grace received.