Chiesa di San Giacomo

At the last fold of the hill above Manta stands a small twelfth-century chapel where the town's Christian life began. San Giacomo was one of the commune's first parishes, and it survives because its community refused to let it go, restoring it in 1661 out of respect for their ancestors and entrusting it to the Alpini.

Why it matters

Manta's early medieval parish map can still be read from this one building. A document of 1386 preserved in the archbishop's curia lists the churches of the Manta territory that paid the cattedratico to the Bishop of Turin: San Giacomo, San Nicolao and San Leone. Of those three, San Nicolao has vanished entirely and San Leone became the patronal sanctuary; San Giacomo alone keeps its twelfth-century body on its original hilltop. The municipal history also names its builders — the Signori di Barge, the ancient family that held the Turris Matae and the valley called Comba Barletta — making the chapel one of the few structures in the area tied to a named lordly house of the 1100s.

What to notice

The chapel's architecture is deliberately humble: a single nave, a bare facade, no monumental portal. What rewards attention is the ensemble. The position — on the summit of the poggio, at the last declivity of the hill — explains the building: parishes stood where people were, and this was where the early settlement's paths converged before the village regrouped at the castle. Inside, the municipal history records paintings and numerous ex-voto, the small painted offerings through which generations gave thanks; the ex-voto preserve the chapel's history as a place of devotion. The Manta section of the Associazione Nazionale Alpini has cared for the chapel and grounds, which locals call the chiesetta degli Alpini.

Context and history

The Signori di Barge built the chapel in the twelfth century while holding dominion over the Turris Matae with its vines, meadows and woods. By 1386 it was established enough to appear among the three parish churches of the Manta territory in the curia's list. The shift that diminished it came in the early fifteenth century, when Valerano Saluzzo della Manta became lord of the castle: the old hill parishes were gradually abandoned as the population concentrated, and from 1427 the new parish of the Purificazione di Maria rose beside the castle — today's church of Santa Maria al Castello. San Giacomo survived as a devotional outpost, and in 1661, when its antiquity threatened it with collapse, the community of Manta chose to restore it "in the form and decoration in which it is currently found" rather than let it fall — a document-worthy act of local heritage consciousness avant la lettre. The Alpini's stewardship continued that chain of local care.