Castello di Cereseto

On the highest ridge of the Monferrato Casalese, the Castello di Cereseto resembles a medieval fortress — tall towers, dark red brick, crenellated walls — yet its story is a twentieth-century one. Rebuilt in neo-Gothic style on medieval foundations and transformed by patron Riccardo Gualino, it has been dubbed the queen of Monferrato's castles.

Why it matters

Cereseto's castle plays a deliberate trick. Everything about its silhouette — the many towers climbing to a large keep, the deep brick colour, the stripes of windows — speaks of the Middle Ages, and the building does stand on the ancient foundations of a medieval fortification. But its present appearance is the work of the early 1900s, when the entrepreneur and art collector Riccardo Gualino turned the site into an artistic and prestigious residence in the neo-Gothic taste then fashionable among European elites. The result is one of the most striking, and certainly the most improbable, castles of the Monferrato Casalese: a fairy-tale apparition above cherry orchards and vineyards, a few kilometres from Casale Monferrato and within sight of the hills of the Sacro Monte di Crea. It is at once a monument to the medieval imagination of its era and a document of the patronage culture that reshaped Monferrato's country seats.

What to notice

The castle crowns the village on a ridge, its irregular towers and dark red brickwork giving the early twentieth-century Neo-Gothic residence a picturesque silhouette. The dark red brickwork and decorated halls with artworks reflect Gualino's early twentieth-century Gothic Revival programme and collecting. The municipal library occupies the castle, bringing a civic use to the patrician residence.

Context and history

A fortification has watched over Cereseto since the medieval period, when the village — documented from around 990 under names such as Cirisidum and Cerexeti, likely from the cherry trees of its hills — stood on the frontier lands of the Monferrato marches. The medieval fortress itself was eventually supplanted, and by the modern era the site carried an older residential structure. The transformation into today's manor came in the early twentieth century at the hands of Riccardo Gualino, the Biella-born entrepreneur, patron and collector whose fortunes also left marks on Turin. Gualino rebuilt and refashioned the complex in rigorous neo-Gothic style, filling it with artworks and hosting a circle of artists and performers; the castle opened its doors to memorable social seasons in the years before the First World War. Later decades were quieter and at times troubled, and the building passed through long periods of limited use. The castle remains a significant part of the cultural heritage of the Monferrato.