Churches and places of worship Chiesa Romanica di Santa Maria Site history: The Romanesque church of S. Maria appears in the register of the Asti churches of 1345, but its construction is certainly about a century earlier. It had an adjoining cemetery but, already in 1585, the pastoral visit report notes its distance from the concentric that had formed and attested in a higher position, defining it as a "country church". Partially restored in 2002, but now in a state of neglect. Site description: The façade with an anachronistic Baroque oculus and a rusty gate to replace a door, stolen long ago, as well as the badly plastered north and south sides, show that at the end of the seventeenth century the building was practically rebuilt by reusing the original bricks with much approximation and with the addition of buttresses. The interior is in a state of total abandonment but still contains the panel relating to the static consolidation of 2002 which was limited to the refurbishment of the roof. The 1693 fresco inside the apse is probably irrecoverable but apparently modestly made. The only original part is the lower half of the apse, while the upper part, particularly clumsy and disproportionate, shows that it has undergone the
Churches and places of worship Chiesa Parrocchiale Madonna del Carmine The parish church, dedicated to the Madonna del Carmine, is attested in documents starting from the end of the sixteenth century. It was subject to alterations and extensions in the seventeenth century and in the second half of the eighteenth century, when it assumed its present form based on a design by the Turin architect Giovanni Battista Pagano. The elegant late Baroque façade, plastered in white, is characterized by a large elliptical oculus, a half-height horizontal frame and an entablature dominated by the triangular tympanum. Inside, with a single nave with four side chapels, valuable eighteenth-century furnishings, a baptismal font and contemporary murals are preserved. Two large canvases, from the eighteenth century, but restored in the nineteenth century, depict the Madonna and Child with saints. Behind the main altar there is a painting of the Black Madonna of the Shrine of Guadalupe, brought from New Mexico in 1752 by Giovanni Battista Codiga, who had made his fortune overseas.