Piazza del Popolo

Piazza del Popolo was laid out over Savigliano's eighteenth-century defences: porticoed trading houses, a market hall from the 1850s and a monument to a general who fell at Adwa, all on ground where the city walls once stood.

Why it matters

Piazza del Popolo is the living centre of Savigliano, and its story explains the shape of the whole town. Work began in 1727, when the community needed a large, regular space for commerce and the weekly market, and the obvious place to build it was over the fortifications that then ringed the old Presidio, including the bastion of San Giovanni. Levelling the ramparts and opening the square was, according to the municipal account, the biggest urban transformation the city undertook in the 1700s, and it stitched the Presidio to San Giovanni, long the largest and busiest of the outlying boroughs. The eastern side is known locally as "il molo".

What to notice

The square forms an eighteenth-century composition rather than a single building. By 1764 it was already enclosed by houses on all four sides, with porticoes running along the north and south sides, and the shops on the southern flank standing directly on the foundations of the old defensive walls. By the end of the eighteenth century the piazza had essentially its present form. The buildings are deliberately restrained: sober facades ordered by lesene and cornices that mark the rhythm of the openings, an example of Piedmontese bourgeois architecture. In the centre stands the monument to General Giuseppe Arimondi, put up in 1899; he was born in Savigliano in 1846 and died at the battle of Adwa in 1896, and the memorial ties the square to the town's military history. On the west side, the big "Tettoia del mercato", the iron-and-masonry market hall built between 1854 and 1857, closes the space.

Context and history

The square's changing names reflect Italy's political history. Under Napoleonic rule it was renamed "Place de lArme"; in the nineteenth century it successively bore the names Castello, del Commercio, Savoia, Vittorio Emanuele II and Indipendenza before taking the name del Popolo after the Liberation. Its urban logic, though, never changed: a level, rectangular trading floor edged by arcades where goods could change hands under cover, with the market hall anchoring the commercial function. The surrounding merchant houses reflect the square's commercial history.