Casale Monferrato is a town in the Piedmont region of north-west Italy, part of the province of Alessandria. It is situated about 60 km east of Turin on the right bank of the Po, where the river runs at the foot of the Monferrato hills. Beyond the river lies the vast plain of the Po valley.The origins of the town are fairly obscure. It is known that the Gaulish settlement of Vardacate (from var= ‘water’; ate= ‘populated place’) existed on the Po in this area, and that it became a Roman municipium. By the beginning of the eighth century there was a small town under Lombard rule, probably called Sedula or Sedulia. It was here (according to late and unreliable accounts) that one Saint Evasius, along with 146 followers, was decapitated on the orders of the Arian Duke Attabulo. Liutprand, King of the Lombards is said to have supported the construction of a church in honour of Evasius. Certainly the martyr’s cult flourished and by 988 the town had become known as Casale di Sant’Evasio. At the time of Charlemagne, the town came under the temporal and religious power of the bishops of Vercelli, from which it was freed by Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Italy. It was sacked by the anti-imperial troops of Vercelli, Alessandria and Milan in 1215, but rebuilt and fortified in 1220. It fell under the power of the Marquess of Montferrat in 1292[citation needed], and later became the capital of the marquessate. In 1536 it passed to the Gonzagas of Mantua, who fortified it strongly. Thereafter it was of considerable importance as a fortress: it successfully resisted the Austrians in 1849, and was strengthened in 1852. Towards the end of the nineteenth century it became known as "Cement Capital" (capitale del cemento), thanks to the quantity of Portland cement in the hills nearby, and in the twentieth century it acquired printing press and refrigerator industries. The historic centre of the town is itself centred on Piazza Mazzini, the site of the Roman forum.[3] Named for Giuseppe Mazzini, a key republican figure of the Risorgimento, it is dominated by an 1843 equestrian statue by Abbondio Sangiorgio of Carlo Alberto, King of Piedmont-Sardinia, dressed in Roman costume, specifically as a senator, with his knees uncovered. The statue was commissioned by the municipal authorities as a mark of gratitude to the king for having selected Casale as the seat of Piedmont’s second Court of Appeal—a restoration, in some sense, of the old senate of Monferrato—and to celebrate the construction of Casale’s first permanent bridge across the Po. Locally the square is invariably called Piazza Cavallo: cavallo being the Italian word for ‘horse’.A little to the east of the square is the fine Lombard Romanesque cathedral of Sant'Evasio, originally founded in 742, rebuilt in the early twelfth century and consecrated in 1106 or 1107; it underwent restoration in 1706 and again in the 19th century. It contains some good pictures, and the relics of Saint Evasius, but is probably most notable for its remarkable narthex. [edit] San Domenico In 1471, after Guglielmo VIII Paleologo had chosen Casale as the permanent location of the Monferrato court, construction began of the church of San Domenico, to the north of Piazza Mazzini. Work on the building ceased for some time, as a result of political instability; in the early sixteenth century a fine, if slightly incongruous, Renaissance portal was imposed on the late Gothic façade. [edit] Via Lanza Via Lanza, which runs northwards from the north-west corner of Piazza Mazzini, is known for the Krumiri Rossi bakery, which indeed produces Krumiri: biscuits which have been a speciality of Casale since their legendary invention in 1870 by one Domenico Rossi after an evening spent with friends in Piazza Mazzini’s Caffè della Concordia (now a bank). Also in Via Lanza is the seventeenth-century church of San Giuseppe, probably designed by Sebastiano Guala; a painting attributed to the Ursuline nun Lucrina Fetti (c.1614–1651[4], brother of Domenico) shows Christ venerated by Sant’Evasio and includes a very accurate depiction of contemporary Casale with its civic tower. The church and convent of San Francesco, which housed the remains of many of the Marquises of Monferrato, was turned to other uses during the eighteenth century and demolished in the nineteenth. The high open tower which is a landmark of Via Lanza belongs to Palazzo Morelli di Popolo; it has been attributed to Bernardo Vittone, and also to Magnocavalli—both are believed to have had a hand in the refurbishment of the building. Piazza Mazzini; in the background Via Saffi leads past the civic tower towards Piazza Castello [edit] Via Saffi Running west from Piazza Mazzini to Piazza Castello is Via Saffi, which contains one of the town’s most recognizable landmarks: the Torre Civica. This brick tower, square in plan and 60 metres high, dates from the eleventh century but suffered severe fire damage in April 1504 when a festival to celebrate the peace between Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I and King Louis XII of France got out of hand. The reconstruction, completed six years later by Matteo Sammicheli, produced a taller structure which included the current bell-chamber. The balconies attached to the upper part of the tower were added during the period of Gonzaga rule. Subsequent restorations were carried out in 1779 (after a lightning strike which destroyed the fifteenth-century clock) and again in 1920. Adjoining the tower is the church of Santo Stefano which stands on the east side of a small sqare named after it. The church’s origins date to the beginning of the second millennium, but it was largely rebuilt in the mid-1600s under a project attributed to Sebastiano Guala; work on the current façade began in 1787 but was not completed until the late nineteenth century. Inside are paintings by Giovanni Francesco Caroto (1480 – 1555), Il Moncalvo (1568 – 1625), Giorgio Alberini (1575/6 – 1625/6), and Francesco Cairo (1607 – 1665). Adorning both the walls and the vault are 15 tondi depicting prophets, apostles and the Virgin painted by Pietro Francesco Guala in 1757, the last year of his life. The south side of Piazza Santo Stefano, facing back towards Via Saffi, is formed by the neo-classical Palazzo Ricci di Cereseto. The imposing façade, marked by four massive brick columns, was built in 1806 to an earlier design by the local architect Francesco Ottavio Magnocavalli. Also in the square is a marble statue of the archaeologist and architect Luigi Canina by Benedetto Cacciatore. [edit] Piazza Castello Piazza Castello is a large irregularly shaped open space used as a car park and as a market square; it is dominated by the castle of the Paleologi which occupies most of its western side. The square arose in 1858 through the demolition of the castle’s eastern ravelin, and was extended in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century when the remaining ravilins were removed. [edit] The castle The castle itself is an imposing 15th century military construction, with a hexagonal plan, four round towers and an encircling moat. Santa Caterina at night. Note the elliptical drum [edit] Santa Caterina At the south-east corner of the piazza is the elegant Baroque church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, better known by its earlier designation of Santa Caterina. A master-work of Giovanni Battista Scapitta, completed after his death by Giacomo Zanetti, it is marked by an elliptical cupola, and a façade curvilinear both in plan and elevation. [edit] Teatro Municipale The theatre, which stands at the north-eastern corner of the piazza at the end of Via Saffi, opened in 1791 with a performance of the La moglie capricciosa, an opera buffa by Vincenzo Fabrizi. Its construction, to a design by Abbot Agostino Vitoli of Spoleto, had taken six years. However it fell into disuse during the period of Napoleonic rule and remained closed for several decades. After extensive internal embellishment, the theatre reopened in 1840 with a performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s Beatrice di Tenda. In 1861 the theatre was sold by the Società dei Nobili to the local authority (the comune) which made it more accessible to the general public. Nevertheless it fell again into decline; during World War II it was used as a store. Major restoration work took place in the 1980s and the theatre finally reopened in 1990 with a performance by Vittorio Gassmann. Since then it has offered a mixture of theatre, music and dance, while the foyer is used for exhibitions, usually photographic. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium with stalls, four tiers of boxes and a gallery (or loggione, i.e. the gods) is richly decorated with frescoes, stucco, gilding and velvet. The curtains of the royal box hang from a structure supported on stucco caryatids by Abbondio Sangiorgio who also designed the equestrian statue in Piazza Mazzini.[5] [edit] Via Garibaldi and Sant’Ilario From the side of the theatre Via Garibaldi leads westwards to the sixteenth-century church of Sant'Ilario, founded in 380 in honour of Hilary of Poitiers. It was completely rebuilt in 1566 and was largely restructured towards the end of the nineteenth century. The church’s polychrome façade is of interest and it contains two important works by Niccolò Musso: the Madonna del Carmine (‘Our Lady of Mount Carmel’) and San Francesco ai piedi del Crocefisso (‘Saint Francis at the foot of the Crucifix’) originally from the church of San Francesco. [edit] Via Roma, ghetto and synagogue Behind the shops on the south side of Via Roma, which runs eastwards from Piazza Mazzini, lay the ghetto which persisted until the emancipation of the Jews in Piedmont following Carlo Alberto’s concession of a constitution, the Statuto Albertino, under the revolutionary pressures of 1848. The Synagogue of Casale Monferrato is inside a building at Vicolo Olper 44 that offers no hint from it |