Arciconfraternita della Pietà

On Piazza Cesare Battisti, the church of the Pietà compresses a full Baroque programme into a tight urban plot: a tall two-storey façade, an illusionistically painted interior, and a mechanical statue of the Risen Christ that has been hoisted at Easter for three centuries. It is Savigliano's most theatrical church, and it still belongs to the confraternity that built it.

Why it matters

Confraternity churches are where Baroque Piedmont expressed its most direct piety, and the Pietà is a textbook case. The building was designed around 1708 by the Turin architect Giovanni Giacomo Plantery, working at almost the same time on the nearby church of the Assunta, and it replaced an older oratory dedicated to Sant'Antonio Abate. Because one institution has used the building continuously, its decorative scheme — architecture, fresco, stucco and sculpture conceived as a single illusionistic effect — survives intact. Its compact interior preserves an integrated eighteenth-century decorative system.

What to notice

The façade is a Piedmontese "altar façade" of pronounced verticality, with two storeys of four columns and a curved tympanum. The bell tower, rebuilt between 1822 and 1825, is integrated into the design. Above the entrance is an 1880 fresco of the Triumph of the Cross by Luigi Molineris of Costigliole Saluzzo. Inside, Pietro Dallamano and collaborators painted the apse; Michele Antonio Millocco painted the dome; Francesco Bianco painted the evangelists; and Giuseppe Beltramelli executed the stuccoes in 1722. These works combine architecture and illusionistic decoration. Behind the high altar hangs Jean Claret's Deposition of Christ, dated 1650 by the municipality and 1656 by the city's heritage itinerary. Carlo Giuseppe Plura's statue of the Risen Christ, made in 1725, is associated with an Easter rite in which a mechanical device raises the figure; the tradition is recorded from 1726, with wooden statues of Sant'Elena and the Angel also carried in procession.

Context and history

The confraternity itself is older than the church: the VisitSavigliano portal traces its foundation to 1445, when it was created to comfort the poor and needy, first meeting in a small chapel of Santa Maria del Pianto in the Borgo Pieve district. When the congregation moved to the city centre, it commissioned Plantery's building, which in turn gained its square only in 1838, when the run-down block known as the Champeaux was demolished to open up Piazza Cesare Battisti in front of it. The church therefore records both the devotional continuity of a lay brotherhood across nearly six centuries and the progressive reshaping of central Savigliano.