A Cistercian monastery that ended up inside a castle. In the locality of Monastero, part of Millesimo, the church and cloister of Santo Stefano are no longer a building in their own right: they sit inside the eclectic residence of the Centurione Scotto family, which absorbed them in the nineteenth century. The complex belonged to the monastery of San Pietro in Savigliano; in 1216, after its purchase by Enrico II Del Carretto, marquis of Millesimo, it passed to the Cistercian nuns of Santa Maria de Betton. The suppression of 1802 closed the religious chapter and opened the private one, which is still running.
What to see
The church is Baroque, rebuilt in the seventeenth century over a Romanesque core still legible in the masonry. Beside it runs the cloister, with sandstone capitals added in the fifteenth century: a soft stone, easy to carve and just as easy to wear away, its edges rounded off by the damp of the Bormida valley.
In a courtyard set against the church is a sixteenth-century fresco of the Virgin with Saint Stephen and several members of the Del Carretto family. It is devotion and title deed at once: the marquises had themselves painted next to the saints, in the monastery they had bought three centuries earlier, so that the valley knew who was in charge.
Visiting
The monastery is now part of Castello Centurione Scotto, a nineteenth-century building in private hands, a few minutes from the centre of Millesimo along the Bormida. From outside you can read the bulk of the church, the bell tower and the boundary wall. The interiors keep no fixed opening hours: they can be seen only during events or special openings, so it is worth asking at the town hall or the tourist office before setting off. The rest of the locality is a handful of houses: with nothing open, the stop lasts half an hour.
Our editors' tip
We pair it with the Del Carretto castle in the village centre: the same family fortified the town and then bought the monastery, and in a few minutes you grasp how that power worked, military on one side and religious on the other. And look at the castle for what it is: the refurbishment of the early twentieth century was commissioned by the marquis Carlo Centurione Scotto and entrusted to Gino and Adolfo Coppedè, the family of architects who left Rome the Coppedè quarter. Under the eclectic shell, the plan is still that of a cloister.