Santuario dei Piloni (Montà)

In the wooded hamlet of Laione on the edge of Montà, the Sanctuary of the Piloni layers religious traditions into one hillside. A late-Romanesque church stands on ground associated with Diana, and a series of Way of the Cross chapels leads to the Santo Sepolcro and its seventeenth-century statuary group.

Why it matters

The sanctuary condenses aspects of the religious history of the Roero in one devotional complex. Its site, known as Valdiana or "Vallis Dianae", was consecrated in pagan times to the goddess of the hunt before becoming a place of Christian cult in the Roman era. The church of Santi Giacomo e Filippo minore is first documented in the 15th century, but its fabric is older: the side walls preserve traces of 13th-century brick decoration, and the late-Romanesque facade sets two reused Roman-era marble faces into the masonry. Around it is what the Ecomuseo delle Rocche del Roero describes as the smallest Sacro Monte in Piedmont: a Via Crucis of chapels, forming an art-historical and devotional complex.

What to notice

Two marble faces set into the façade are Roman spolia, predating the church around them. Brick ornamentation from the thirteenth century survives inside and along the walls. Thirteen Via Crucis chapels, rebuilt in 1897 in hexagonal form on the line of piloni recorded from 1774, contain statuary groups depicting scenes of the Passion. The sequence concludes at the Grotta dell'Agonia and the Santo Sepolcro, where a seventeenth-century group represents the Lamentation over the dead Christ. Chestnuts, Scots pines and vineyard margins form the surrounding vegetation typical of the Rocche del Roero.

Context and history

The sequence of cults here — Diana, then Roman worship, then a medieval parish church, then a baroque-era devotional route — mirrors how rural Piedmont sanctuaries usually grew: a respected site was never abandoned, only rededicated. The chapel path took shape in the later 18th century, when the first piloni (masonry pillars or chapel-markers of the Way of the Cross) are cited from 1774, and was rebuilt to its present hexagonal design in 1897. The Santo Sepolcro with its Compianto sculpture group completes a scheme familiar from the great Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy, compressed here into an intimate hillside. The sanctuary remains associated with the Sentiero Religioso and with both pilgrimage and local devotional history.