Museo Civico Casa Cavassa

Casa Cavassa is Saluzzo's civic museum, installed since the late nineteenth century in one of the most eloquent Renaissance houses of the former Marquisate. Fifteen furnished rooms, painted wooden ceilings and works by the court painter Hans Clemer preserve art and domestic culture of the former Marquisate.

Why it matters

Saluzzo was the seat of an independent marquisate for roughly four centuries, and Casa Cavassa preserves the cultural legacy of that political independence. The house belonged to Galeazzo Cavassa, vicar general of the Marquis from 1464, and to his son Francesco, who held the same office. Turned into a museum in 1891, it preserves a domestic environment of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

What to notice

At the entrance, the marble portal and carved wooden door, attributed to Matteo Sanmicheli and dated to around 1518–1528, carry the Cavassa family motto about justice at whatever cost. Inside, the sequence of fifteen rooms unfolds under painted wooden ceilings and decorated walls, with period furniture assembled to evoke the original setting. The loggia's monochrome frescoes of the Labours of Hercules were painted by Hans Clemer between 1506 and 1511. Clemer, a Flemish painter active at the Saluzzo court, is also represented by the altarpiece of the Madonna della Misericordia of about 1499. Room V holds a late-Gothic wooden choir brought from the marquises' chapel in Revello, a rare survival of carved church furniture of this quality.

Context and history

The Cavassa family had come from Carmagnola and rose through legal service to the top of the marquisate's administration. Their house on what is now Via San Giovanni was both a private residence and a stage for public life. After the family's prominence faded, the building decayed until 1883, when the marchese Emanuele Tapparelli d'Azeglio (1816–1890) bought it and commissioned restorations from the engineer Melchiorre Pulciano and the painter Vittorio Avondo, working on the principle of stylistic completion typical of the period. He filled the house with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century objects to recreate period furnishings, and in 1888 donated the building to the city on condition it be used as a museum or for municipal ceremonies. The civic museum opened there in 1891, and two fresco fragments rescued from La Castiglia — a Madonna with Child and a Deposition — entered the collection. It is a telling detail: the city's two museum buildings are bound together by the same nineteenth-century rescue effort.