Convento dei Frati Cappuccini

Above the streets of Châtillon, the Capuchin convent was founded in 1626 when Baron Paul Emmanuel di Challant gave the friars a house. Its chapel of San Francesco d'Assisi was rebuilt in the seventeenth century with a carved wooden altar.

Why it matters

Capuchin houses were founded to serve towns humbly, and this one has done so for four centuries, surviving Napoleon's suppression of religious orders and reopening under the bishop of Aosta. Its history preserves the record of the Capuchin order in Valle d'Aosta. The chapel offers a compact lesson in that tradition: whitewashed sobriety outside, and inside an early wooden altar showing Saint Francis, together with the heraldic shields of the Challant and Passerin d'Entrèves families whose patronage shaped the friary.

What to notice

The chapel of San Francesco d'Assisi contains a carved wooden altar with a figure of Saint Francis and the coats of arms of the Challant and Passerin d'Entrèves families, which successively protected the friars. The first chapel here had been dedicated to Saint Grato, the patron of Aosta, before its rebuilding. After the Napoleonic suppression of 1802, the building was requisitioned as a military store.

Context and history

In 1626 Baron Paul Emmanuel di Challant ceded a house in Châtillon to the Capuchins, who formally settled in 1633. Finding the original chapel, dedicated to Saint Grato, too small, they rebuilt it entirely between 1635 and 1642 and rededicated it to Saint Francis. The convent ran uninterrupted until 1802, when the Napoleonic administration suppressed the order and requisitioned the building as a store for troops. In 1895 the bishop of Aosta, Joseph-Auguste Duc, bought the complex and restored religious life there.