Chiesa di Santa Caterina

On Piazza Castello, between the Paleologi fortress and the eighteenth-century theatre, stands one of the most elegant baroque churches of Piedmont. Officially dedicated to Santa Maria delle Grazie but known as Santa Caterina, it is a curvilinear two-body building by Giovanni Battista Scapitta, consecrated in 1726 and splendidly frescoed.

Why it matters

Santa Caterina is baroque architecture of unusual sophistication for a provincial capital. The church that Casale sees today grew inside a convent of Dominican nuns whose community reached back to 1471, and whose house had been given by Marchesa Anna d'Alençon herself — the building is therefore a document of how Counter-Reformation enclosure rules shaped architecture, with one interior hall for the nuns behind gratings and another for the public. Classic historiography assigns the design to Giovanni Battista Scapitta, born at Moncalvo in 1653, and the result — an elliptical cupola, a façade curved in both plan and elevation — has earned the church a place among the masterworks of Piedmontese baroque. The church's continuing restoration reflects its place in Casale Monferrato's religious and architectural heritage.

What to notice

The building comprises two connected halls. The inner one, finished by 1715, was the private choir of the nuns, linked directly to their convent in Palazzo Trevisio; the outer one, opening on Piazza Castello, was consecrated by Bishop Radicati in 1726. The façade curves in plan and elevation, and above it swells the elliptical drum of the cupola — a signature of Scapitta's manner. Giovanni Carlo Aliberti painted saints and allegories of the virtues up to the cornice; painters Benaschi and Vittore decorated the drum and cupola. The polychrome high altar carries Giovan Battista Bernero's statue of the Assunta, executed in 1780. Grilles and passages preserve the church's original division between the enclosed nuns' choir and the public hall.

Context and history

The Dominican tertiary community of Santa Caterina was instituted in 1471, under Marquis Guglielmo VIII, by the widowed noblewoman Pometa de' Buzzelini with the sisters Ruffina and Nicoletta de' Salmazzi. On 6 July 1528 Marchesa Anna d'Alençon, governing the marquisate for her minor son Bonifacio, donated the nuns a marchional palace in the Cantone Montarone, where a first church was made on the ground floor in the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth century the community grew and the spaces were enlarged, leading at the start of the Settecento to the twin-hall church: the interior hall inside the claustral enclosure was complete by 1715, while the public hall facing Piazza Castello was consecrated on the bishop's visitation of 1726. The project is attributed by classic historiography to Giovanni Battista Scapitta, born at Moncalvo, with the mason Donato Zanetti documented in structural interventions. The church belongs to the Collegio Convitto Municipale Trevisio and is cared for today by La Fabbrica di Santa Caterina ETS.