Piazza Maggiore

Mondovì's civic heart beats on the hilltop rather than at street level. Piazza Maggiore, ringed by palaces spanning the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque centuries, is where the medieval commune first organised itself and remains central to the history of Mondovì Piazza.

Why it matters

The municipal tourism portal presents the Piazza quarter as the place where Mondovì lived "the most ancient and memorable pages of its history", and Piazza Maggiore is its centre of gravity. The city itself was founded in 1198 by communities from the hill of Vico and neighbouring villages, won back its independence as Mons Regalis in 1290, and passed to the House of Savoy in the fifteenth century. The square, laid out in Gothic forms between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, is the architectural summary of that long civic story.

What to notice

The arcades on the north side survive from a continuous circuit that once ran around the square; their pointed sandstone Gothic arches belong to medieval buildings later absorbed into houses rebuilt in newer styles. Towers and bell towers define the quarter's skyline, and the square lies within the circle of the old walls above the Langhe hills. Palazzo Fauzone di Germagnano, a medieval signorial house with a thirteenth-century core and an eighteenth-century façade, houses the Ceramics Museum. Civic and ecclesiastical buildings across the square, including the old Town Hall and cathedral quarter, reflect the competing powers that shaped the commune.

Context and history

Mondovì's hilltop commune took some of its "first steps of freedom and autonomy", as the town's official portal puts it, on this hill. After the traumatic early centuries — sackings, Angevin occupation, purchase of independence in 1290 — the settled medieval town began to build in stone around this square. The porticoes answered a practical need for covered market and meeting space in a windswept hilltop settlement, and their surviving Gothic arches are among the oldest architectural fabric in the city.

From the sixteenth century onward the square acquired its elegant dress. Noble families such as the Fauzone rebuilt or refaced their houses here; the Fauzone palace was reworked in the early 1700s into the sober baroque residence visible today, and its heraldic rooms now serve as museum galleries. The baroque age rewrote the medieval square in a single homogeneous dialect, finding its focal point in the church of the Missione, while the Palazzo dei Bressani on the square recalls a family's medieval pre-eminence. The square is a layered document of medieval structure, Renaissance openings, Baroque refacings and later civic history.