Chiesa di San Giuseppe detta la Misericordia

Between the old Citadel and via Vico stands the church that launched Francesco Gallo's hometown career. Built for the Discalced Carmelites between 1709 and 1717 and known as La Misericordia after the confraternity that has cared for it since 1861, it compresses a central-plan interior, painted vaults and a crypt into one of Mondovì Piazza's most disciplined baroque envelopes.

Why it matters

San Giuseppe was the first church Francesco Gallo built in Mondovì, the city of his birth, and it shows the qualities that made him the leading architect of the Savoyard baroque: a deliberately plain brick façade whose effect comes from proportion and urban placement rather than ornament, and a compressed interior where the central space expands while the transept all but disappears. The decorative unity is exceptional, because Gallo brought in exactly two artists, a perspective painter and a figure painter, to cover the vaults in a single coherent programme. The building remains associated with the Confraternita della Misericordia, founded in the fourteenth century.

What to notice

• The unadorned brick façade, calculated to work through structure and context instead of decoration.
• The interior geometry: a widened central zone, a barely present transverse arm, and two lateral altars closing the plan.
• The three polychrome-marble altars with sarcophagus mensas, designed by Gallo himself.
• The apse vault's Gloria di San Giuseppe and the cupola's Trionfo dei Santi del Carmelo, by the perspective painter Pietro Antonio Pozzo of Lugano and the figure painter Giovanni Francesco Gagini of Bissone, the two artists Gallo summoned for unity of effect.
• Sixteen 18th-century perimeter canvases with episodes from the life of Santa Teresa d'Avila.
• The white marble Madonna della Misericordia with a kneeling donor, dated 1619, and a 17th-century canvas of the Madonna with Sant'Antonio Abate and San Mauro from the confraternity's earlier church.
• The crypt, contemporary with the church and entered from a side door, with a Carmelite coat-of-arms slab marking the probable original altar, tomb slabs of patrons and burial areas reserved for the Carmelite fathers.

Context and history

The Discalced Carmelites commissioned the church from Gallo, and work ran from 1709 to 1717. In 1861, after the Carmelites had gone, the building passed to the Confraternita di Sant'Antonio Abate e San Giovanni Decollato, known as La Misericordia, whose premises bordered the Carmelite property, and the popular name has followed the confraternity ever since. That brotherhood, founded in the mid-fourteenth century and affiliated from 1604 with the Company of Mercy of Rome, historically assisted prisoners and the condemned. The church therefore carries three layered identities: Carmelite foundation, Gallo's debut in his native city, and confraternal home that gave the street and the building their everyday name.