Arco di Porta Narzole

The Arch of Porta Narzole is an unfinished eighteenth-century gateway in Cherasco's former defensive walls. Planned as a counterpart to Cherasco's votive arch at the other end of town, it preserves a trace of the city's star-shaped defensive plan and the later avenues laid out over the former walls.

Why it matters

Cherasco is one of the clearest surviving star towns of Piedmont, and this arch marks the far end of its monumental axis. The seventeenth-century Belvedere arch and this eighteenth-century arch were conceived as a perspectival pair framing the historic centre. The gate also preserves the memory of the defensive transformation of 1610, when architect Ascanio Vittozzi redesigned the walls for the age of artillery, giving the city the star-shaped form that Borgonio drew for his Theatrum Sabaudiae.

What to notice

The arch aligns with the Arco del Belvedere toward the town, forming an unfinished eighteenth-century perspectival pair. The earlier arch is richly decorated with Marian sculpture, while the unfinished Porta Narzole arch is plainer and truncated. The avenues around the centre follow the line of the walls, demolished in the early nineteenth century and replaced by tree-lined boulevards. The gate thus survives as the punctuation mark of a defensive system that exists elsewhere only as a street plan.

Context and history

The walls that Porta Narzole punctuated were themselves a response to a military revolution. In 1610 Ascanio Vittozzi, architect to the House of Savoy, designed and built new fortifications at the moment when gunpowder artillery had made medieval curtains obsolete; the trace he drew bent the perimeter into angular bastions, producing the star shape celebrated in Borgonio's atlas of Savoyard lands. Two centuries later, with the frontier far away and Napoleon's armies passing through, the walls had lost their purpose. Demolished early in the 1800s, they left boulevards in their footprint, and the unfinished arch at the Narzole entrance remained as evidence of the grander gateway scheme that money and history never allowed to finish. It is, in that sense, a monument to an idea of the city as much as to any wall.