Asti's cathedral took two centuries to complete: construction began in 1266 and did not finish until 1470, raising the largest Gothic church in Piedmont, plain red brick outside with a rose window as its main flourish.
The bell tower, whose base is older still, was rebuilt starting the same year as the new church by the master mason Jacopo Ghigo. Inside, Bolognese and Milanese painters covered the vaults with biblical scenes and allegories in the early eighteenth century, and Carlo Innocenzo Carloni frescoed the presbytery with stories of the Virgin and the city's patron saints, Marziano and Secondo, in 1767. The cathedral still functions as a working parish church, so visits pause around Mass times, posted at the door. Come for the size of the thing as much as any single detail: little else in the region matches its plain bulk.
