Museo Civico Antonino Olmo e Gipsoteca Davide Calandra

In the seventeenth-century former convent of San Francesco, Savigliano keeps two collections under one roof: a civic museum grown from a century of donations, and the gipsoteca of Turin sculptor Davide Calandra, where plaster models — including the cast of the Montecitorio frieze — reveal how public monuments were made. It is the city's principal art museum.

Why it matters

The museum is the memory-bank of Savigliano. Born from the first civic bequests in the early twentieth century, it evolved from a local collection into a museum of regional interest thanks to major donations of art, foremost among them the plaster casts of Davide Calandra (1856–1915). It is also a museum of rescue: across roughly a hundred years it has received paintings, sculptures and everyday objects from deconsecrated churches and converted civic buildings, so the dispersed heritage of the town and its territory ended up here. After restoration, the gipsoteca was reopened in 2002, and three first-floor sections were completed in 2005.

What to notice

The two-storey former convent encloses a cloister whose lunettes carry frescoes depicting episodes from Franciscan history. The collection includes an 1817 relief map of Savigliano, a Lombard funerary slab, archaeological remains and the Davide Calandra Gipsoteca in the former church of San Francesco. The gipsoteca holds masks, sketches and plaster and terracotta models, including a cast of the frieze of Rome's Montecitorio chamber. The Pensa di Marsaglia–Frutteri di Costigliola donation includes a Flemish triptych with the Story of Job, a Crucifixion by Defendente Ferrari, and sixteenth- to eighteenth-century sculpture and paintings. The pinacoteca includes works by Giovanni Antonio Molineri, Isidoro Claret and Sebastiano Carello; other rooms present graphics, textiles and devotional objects. The Attilio Bonino donation of Piedmontese art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is arranged as a collector's house.

Context and history

Two presentation devices explain the museum's identity well: a "talking portrait" of Giovanni Antonio Molineri, in which an actor animates the great local painter, and a second animated portrait explaining why the Pensa family, wealthy banker-merchants, acquired works in the Netherlands and from the best artists active in Piedmont and Liguria — like a future memory entrusted to the city. The museum is part of the Musei Torino Piemonte circuit. Municipal records trace its first legacies to 1904 and an inauguration in 1913.