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mondovi |
| Half an hour by train from Cúneo, MONDOVÍ is a town split into two:
the lower half - Breo - is modern and sleepily suburban, while the upper
half, Piazza, is an uneasy combination of crumbling medieval and
exuberant Baroque. Neither is especially exciting, but the town gives
access to some interesting fifteenth-century frescoes, a sanctuary and
some caves nearby. Time in Mondoví is best spent in Piazza, built around a large square on which stand a turretted medieval palace and an exotic Baroque church, the seventeenth-century Chiesa della Missione , whose interior is decorated with an incredible trompe l'oeil by Andrea Pozzo, a cloudy heaven with angels seemingly suspended in mid-air. If you've time, you can laze around in the Belvedere , to the north of Piazza, a garden occupying the site of a thirteenth-century church destroyed except for its campanile in the last century. The campanile was used by a physicist in the eighteenth century to establish topographical measurements; though you can't climb up, the views from garden-level stretch north to the hills of Le Langhe and south to the foothills of the Alps. |