Vescovado - Sale dei Vescovi e degli Arazzi

Beside the cathedral on Mondovì's hilltop, the Bishop's Palace guards three rooms of exceptional density: a hall frescoed with 69 portraits of local worthies where university degrees were once conferred, a gallery of the diocese's bishops, and a tapestry room whose Brussels weavings follow designs by Rubens.

Why it matters

The palace brings together a university ceremony hall, an episcopal portrait gallery and Flemish tapestries based on designs by Rubens. The Vescovado's story runs from the late fourteenth century — on 23 October 1389 the commune bought the building from the Borghese family to house the first bishop, Damiano Zoagli — through the decades when Mondovì held Piedmont's first university. Forty-one bishops have lived here, and their successive building campaigns produced the palace seen today, with late-eighteenth-century works directed by the architect Giuseppe Castelli and vaults redecorated by the painter Angelo Persico, finished in 1793 under a Latin inscription that celebrated the hall's "restitution to posterity".

What to notice

The Sala delle Lauree, the Hall of Degrees, is the centrepiece. From 1560, when Mondovì became a university seat, degree ceremonies in Law, Medicine and Theology were held here until 1719, with the bishop serving as Grand Chancellor of the university. Bishop Antonio Castrucci had the walls painted in the late sixteenth century with portraits of illustrious local figures; additions continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until 69 figures stood depicted, each with name, titles and family arms, starting from 1375. Above the doors, monochrome figures of six ancient Greek and Roman scholars; at the vault's centre, the virtue of Faith; and on the left wall, full-length, Duke Emanuele Filiberto, founder of the university.

The Sala dei Vescovi portrays Zoagli's successors down to the present day, among them Michele Ghislieri — bishop from 1560 to 1566 and later Pope Pius V — beneath a 1790 fresco of Pope Urban VI, who erected the diocese in 1388 and granted Mondovì the title of city and the name Monte Regale, with a topographic map of the territory below. The vault carries the virtue of Hope.

The Sala degli Arazzi holds four large early-seventeenth-century tapestries woven in Brussels by François Van den Hecke on designs by Pietro Paolo Rubens, depicting episodes from the wars of the Roman general Publio Decio Mure against the Latins as told by Titus Livy; the preparatory cartoons are recorded in the Liechtenstein collection at Vaduz and the models in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Tradition attributes their purchase in Paris in the early nineteenth century to Monsignor Pio Vitale. The same room displays an ivory crucifix traditionally attributed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and the vault shows the virtue of Charity.

Context and history

A restoration completed in 2025 brought the three halls back to their decorated state. The inscription of 1793 in the Hall of Degrees marks the earlier great restoration that fixed the rooms' current appearance.

The palace's university role links it directly to the city's widest moment: Emanuele Filiberto's foundation of 1560 made Mondovì, briefly, the capital of Piedmontese learning before the university moved to Turin. The halls preserve the memory of that institutional primacy in paint and ceremony.