The cathedral of San Giusto stands in piazza Savoia, in the historic centre of Susa, set against an ancient gate of the Roman walls. It began as a Benedictine abbey: Olderico Manfredi II, marquis of Turin and Susa, founded it in 1027 with his wife Berta and his brother Alrico, bishop of Asti, on the site of an early Christian church leaning on the fourth-century walls. The monks arrived the following year, but the complex was finished only in 1035. It has been a national monument since 1940.
What to see
The exterior is Romanesque. The front faces west, is gabled and wholly plastered white: below opens the portal, above four pilaster strips divide the wall into three sections with a large single-light window at the centre and two blind ones at the sides, and at the top run a red brick cornice and three pinnacles. The bell tower is fifty-one metres high, dates from the eleventh century and rises through six orders, the three lower with single-light windows, the three upper with two-, three- and four-light ones; the cusp and the spires were commissioned in the fifteenth century by cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville. Just to the right of the church rises the Porta Savoia, a fourth-century Roman gate with two round towers.
Visiting
The right flank is a small open-air gallery. In the lunette of a side portal later walled up is a Crucifixion painted between 1125 and 1130, the oldest fresco in the building; beside it, on the wall, the coat of arms of Guillaume d'Estouteville held by two angels, painted between 1457 and 1483. Around the baptistery door is the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, and in the soffit of a walled-up pointed arch there are saints. Inside, the plan is a Latin cross with three naves of five bays each, cross-vaulted; the side chapels were opened between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Our editors' tip
This church became a cathedral late and almost by necessity: when Susa was made an episcopal see in 1772, the Benedictine monastery beside it had closed and the church had already lost its monastic functions, so a building made for something else was raised to cathedral. The baroque decoration added in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was largely stripped away in the nineteenth, and the interior now has a neo-Romanesque look that is a nineteenth-century idea of the Middle Ages. Look instead at the exterior and the Porta Savoia together: there the Middle Ages and Rome really do touch, with nothing in between.