The church of San Domenico, in Casale Monferrato, was founded in 1472 by Marquis Guglielmo VIII of Montferrat and finished in 1506; it was entrusted to the Dominican fathers, and in the same years the convent was built too. Church and convent remained united until 1822, when a part of the convent was divided into three lots and handed over to private owners.
What to see
The façade is in brick, marked by projecting buttresses. Its finest element is the portal of 1505, surmounted by a rose window. The many restorations, above all those of the eighteenth century, deeply changed the structure and fused Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. The interior has a nave and two aisles, with tall columns.
The works of art range from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. There is a fifteenth-century Madonna and Child of the Flemish school; there are canvases with stories of St Dominic, the miracle of the book and the raising of Cardinal Colonna's nephew, and the Battle of the Albigensians by Pier Francesco Guala; other paintings are attributed to Nicolò Musso, Giovan Battista Caire and Guglielmo Caccia. In a sixteenth-century tomb lies Benvenuto Sangiorgio, a knight of Jerusalem and member of the Senate of Casale, and the church also holds the tombs of some Palaiologos and Gonzaga princes. In the convent, worth noting are the chapel of the Rosary, rich in stuccoes, the Renaissance cloister, the bell tower and the fifteenth-century hall.
Visiting
Opening and Mass times should be checked on the spot, and so should the possibility of seeing the rooms of the convent.
Our editors' tip
Look closely at the rose window above the portal: all around it are the signs of the zodiac. And inside, count the aisles: there are three, but once there were four. The fourth was removed by the Dominicans in 1675, to make the church symmetrical.
