Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta (Duomo di Ivrea)

Few Italian cathedrals compress so much history into one hilltop. Ivrea's Duomo stands over the remains of a Roman temple and an early Christian basilica, keeps the Romanesque apse and bell towers of Bishop Warmondo's church, and wraps them in a Baroque nave — with a crypt and cloister that reward unhurried looking.

Why it matters

This is the mother church of a diocese that took root here in the fourth or fifth century, and its foundations read like a stratigraphy of Italian history. Excavations during nineteenth-century building works uncovered traces of a Roman temple, and by the late fourth or early fifth century the site had become a Christian basilica — the same era in which the diocese of Ivrea was born. Around the year 1000 Bishop Warmondo rebuilt the church on a grand scale, and much of his Romanesque fabric survives. Later centuries added a twelve-sided tiburio, a Baroque remodelling and a neoclassical facade, so a single visit spans pagan Ivrea, the early Church, the Ottonian empire and the age of the Savoy bishops — placing the cathedral among the historic landmarks of the old town.

What to notice

The ambulatory contains columns and capitals from the paleo-Christian basilica remain embedded in the apse wall, an unusual piece of architectural recycling visible at eye level. Warmondo's contribution survives in the apse, the two bell towers and the oldest part of the crypt, key examples of Romanesque building in the Canavese. In the crypt, The Roman sarcophagus of Caio Atecio Valerio, reused for centuries as the repository of the relics of San Besso, alongside medieval frescoes and a thirteenth-century Madonna and Child. The chapel of San Savino, built in the 1760s, holds the relics of the diocese's patron saint beneath an altarpiece by Claudio Beaumont showing the kneeling saint before the Madonna and Child flanked by the Theban martyrs. The fitted storytelling system in the crypt helps non-specialists read the layers. The cloister's shaded space of the canons adjacent to the church.

Context and history

The building's phases are unusually well documented. Warmondo, bishop from about 969 to the first decade of the eleventh century, enlarged the cathedral and founded the scriptorium whose manuscripts still survive in the Biblioteca Capitolare nearby . In the twelfth century, after the earthquake of 1117 recorded across the region, the church was rebuilt with the orientation reversed, moving the presbytery to the west and adding aisles, a transept and the tiburio. In 1516 Bishop Bonifacio Ferrero commissioned a Bramante-style portico facade, and in the late eighteenth century Bishop Ottavio Pocchettini had Giuseppe Martinez reshape the interior in late-Baroque style, with the tall pilasters, Corinthian capitals and elliptical dome seen today. The present neoclassical facade, by architect Gaetano Bertolotti on a Palladian model, was added in 1854 together with an extra nave bay. Worship has continued in the building in different forms for some sixteen centuries.