The cathedral of San Donato is the main church of Pinerolo and the bishop's seat of the diocese; it stands in the historic centre, in Piazza San Donato, and has been a national monument since 1940. It rises on the site of an older church, built in the tenth century by Olderico Manfredi II, Marquis of Turin and Susa, and first mentioned in a document of 1044. From the end of the fourteenth century it was entirely rebuilt: in 1508 the new church was finished, and it was consecrated by Baldassarre Bernezzo, titular archbishop of Laodicea in Syria. It became a cathedral in 1748, when Pope Benedict XIV created the diocese of Pinerolo.
What to see
The façade is entirely later than 1808, when an earthquake destroyed the previous one. Four pilasters of red brick, each with a pinnacle on top, divide it into three sections plastered in cream, one for each aisle. Below open three splayed portals with painted lunettes: in the central one is the Coronation of Mary, and above it, in the gable, the Risen Christ within a mandorla. Higher up are three rose windows, and above the central one a fresco of the Trinity. On the left side stands the bell tower of 1425, which in the Middle Ages served as the civic tower: it was never completed and has remained without a spire. The eight pointed-arch windows of the belfry were opened in 1763.
The interior has a nave and two aisles of five bays, with cross vaults, and is entirely frescoed: the frescoes were painted in 1887 by Alessandro Vacca and Giuseppe Rollini, who also designed the stained glass. It is the outcome of the restoration begun in 1855 to a design by Edoardo Mella and Melchiorre Pulciano, which removed the Baroque additions to bring the church back to its Gothic forms: of the eighteenth century only the high altar of polychrome marbles was kept, and today it stands behind the new terracotta altar, surrounded by the wooden stalls of the choir. Against a column of the nave is the seventeenth-century wooden pulpit, richly carved and covered by a canopy.
Visiting
Opening times and the times of services should be checked with the cathedral parish.
Our editors' tip
There are two organs. The main one, on the gallery on the inner façade, was built in 1914 by Carlo Vegezzi Bossi and installed in the cathedral in 1919. The other is an eighteenth-century positive organ, standing on the floor in the right aisle: it is entirely mechanical, has a single keyboard and is probably the work of the Turin organ builder Giuseppe Calandra.
