The abbey stands where the Gesso, Vermenagna and Stura valleys meet, the site of Roman Pedona and its customs post. The first early Christian church was raised at the edge of the settlement around the sixth century, over the Roman necropolis: burial slabs and parts of the apse have been found. Between 701 and 712, at the urging of the Lombard king Aripert II, the first true abbey complex was founded, and shortly afterwards the tomb of Saint Dalmatius was moved there.
What to see
The heart of the building is the Romanesque crypt. In the southern crypt there survive traces of the polychrome floor in stucco and crushed brick, of the twelfth century, which partly covers the semicircular apse of the early Christian church: two churches, one above the other, legible at the same spot. You then cross the chapel that tradition calls Angioina, decorated in the fifteenth century with a fine fresco cycle. Higher up, the chapel raised at the end of the seventeenth century above the presbytery is adorned with gilded stuccoes and with paintings of the death, the carrying and the glory of the saint, and it holds the reliquary bust in silver leaf of 1594, made for a fragment of the skull.
Visiting
From the church you go down to the archaeological area, and this is the part that surprises most. There is the corridor cut in the eighteenth century, when the abbey villa was built; there is a glass floor beneath which you see some of the most telling tombs of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, what is left of the cemetery that ringed the church; and under the portico along the southern flank lie two Roman cremation tombs, one an underground masonry chamber with side niches, the other a box of bricks. You enter through the abbey museum, which the parish runs with the volunteers of the Pedo Dalmatia association.
Our editors' tip
Keep an eye on the story of the relics, because it is the story of the abbey. The first record is from 902, in the diploma of Louis III; in the following century the saint's body was taken to Quargnento and the monastery declined; part of it came back here in 1176. The bull granted by Pope Innocent IV to abbot Anselmo in 1246 still lists a substantial estate, but in 1438 the abbey was united once and for all with the bishop's table of Mondovì. In the mid sixteenth century the French occupied Borgo and fortified the monastery, damaging it: bishop Gerolamo Scarampi wrote as much in his pastoral visit of 1583. The last solemn translation of the tomb, into the raised chapel, dates from 1636.