The monastery of San Giacomo di Valleombrosa in Valmanera, known as the Certosa d'Asti (Charterhouse of Asti) or Certosa di Valmanera, stands in the Borgo San Pietro, in the Certosa municipal park, on the north-western edge of the city. Deconsecrated, it is partly a school and partly the seat of the restoration workshop known as the Arazzeria Scassa.
What to see
Of the original Charterhouse only part of the loggia remained. The surviving block has been recovered to create a museum area and the manufacturing centre of the Arazzeria Scassa: five rooms on two floors with a collection of tapestries made from sketches by important Italian and foreign painters, among them Casorati, De Chirico, Guttuso, Dalí, Ernst, Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse and Miró. In the adjacent area is the weaving workshop.
The monastery belonged first to the Vallombrosan monks, the order founded by Saint John Gualbert, and then to the Carthusians: the first document mentioning it is a bequest of 1391. Under them the complex grew, with a fishpond and a plot of vineyard and vegetable garden enclosed by a brick wall; the buildings covered almost six thousand square metres, around a large cloister with the friars' little houses. The church, dedicated to Saints Philip and James, was Gothic, with three aisles, and on the high altar from 1498 stood the altarpiece of the Madonna in glory by Macrino d'Alba; the monks' choir, with forty inlaid stalls, was built by 1496 by the Cremonese carver Paolo Sacca with his father Tommaso and his brother Imerio. Occupied several times by troops during the wars, the Charterhouse was suppressed by the Napoleonic government in 1801 and its furnishings promptly looted.
Visiting
The Certosa is in the Certosa municipal park, in the Valmanera area, north-west of the centre of Asti. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements for the Arazzeria: check them.
Our editors' tip
To see what the Charterhouse looked like as a whole, look for the seventeenth-century altarpiece with Carthusian saints and a view of the entire complex, kept at Grana Monferrato, not far from Asti; the great altarpiece by Macrino d'Alba is instead in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin.
