Chiusano d'Asti: sights, history and trails

The coat of arms of the municipality is currently awaiting official recognition. The crowned lion rampant is resumed by the blason of the Pelletta family^[5] (of gold, blue lion, armed, tongued and crowned with red), who included Chiusano in their Lordship in the second half of the 15th century, even if they had been partially owners of it since the 13th century.

The banner is a blue cloth.

The parish church, dedicated to the Madonna del Carmine, is attested in documents from the end of the sixteenth century. It was the object of renovations and expansions in the 17th century and in the second half of the 18th century, when it assumed the current forms on design by the Turinese architect Giovanni Battista Pagano. The elegant late-baroque façade, plastered in white, is characterized by a large elliptical oculo, a horizontal half-height frame and a trabeation surmounted by the triangular tympane.

Inside, with a single nave with four side chapels, there are valuable 18th century furnishings, a baptismal font and coevi mural paintings. Two large canvases from the 18th century, but restored in the 19th century, depict the Madonna with Child and Saints. Behind the main altar there is a painting of the Black Madonna of the Shrine of Guadalupe, brought from New Mexico in 1752 by Giovanni Battista Codiga, who had made his fortune overseas.

On the edge of the municipal road that leads from the valley floor to Chiusano d'Asti, along a path leading to a wooded hill, there is the small church of Santa Maria. The building, dating back to the 14th century, was restored in the 17th and 19th centuries before being restored in 2003. The simple hut facade is framed by two corner parastes that hold a triangular timp, at whose base opens a small oculo oval. The apse has an arched frame. Inside, a fresco of the 17th century is preserved in the absidal catino.Announcement.

In the last hundred years, from 1921, the resident population has halved.

Inhabitants registered^[6]

The drum

Basketball is the sport par excellence of Chiusano d'Asti. The sports company was born in 1968 under the name "Union Sportiva Chiusano", arborando i colori giallo e blu sulla coat of arms of the municipality. The first tournament in which the team's participation is held is the Tournament of Monferrato in 1968, to which a "preview" team is added (which corresponds to the modern "Under 18").

The sports field, once located in the valley near the lake, was moved in 1989 closer to the historic center, and entitled to Renato Gerbo, a closed drummer. It can be reached by car through the provincial road, and on foot through the pedestrian path "The garden of poets".

Important Piedmontese sports nursery, the company U.S. Chiusano made his Serie A debut in 2019, after a six-year cycle in which the company won the maximum series of promotions starting from Serie D. During his only year in Serie A, the U.S. Chiusano conquered salvation, but decided to start again from Serie D with a new group of young people.^[7]

In 2025, Chiusano again won the promotion in Serie B, but gave up. In 2026, Chiusano participated in the Piedmont D Series.

Perhaps Chiusano d'Asti is the only country in the province to have kept alive the tradition of "Pessera". Oral testimony of this propitiatory rite is documented from the end of the nineteenth century to today.

The pessera is a particular variety of fir trees characterized by the trunk perfectly right to the point to be used for the ships' trees. At every birth of a male son the whole country celebrates the event carrying, at dusk, a long "heavy" in procession through the streets of the village, ending in the nursery of the newborn where it is planted after being decorated at the top with the flag of Italy and other objects that symbolize what hopes for the future man. All of course accompanied by music, dances, drinks and food offered by the family of the birthday party. To hold the "heavy" are only the co-written, that is the boys of the lever of that year plus the men who celebrated the lever ten, twenty, thirty years before and so below ten in ten.

The rite will be repeated at the end of the eighteenth year, at the feast of leverage, when always the conscripts will carry in procession, with songs and dances, the “heavy” and will return to replant it in the hay of the celebrated; this time however, the future man will have to defend it, all night, from its overthrow or theft by the co-writes of other neighboring countries.

The "heavy" is a typically male pay rite of welcoming a new member in the community. Since 1959 the rite has been emancipated adapting itself to the times, in fact it lost its male prerogative turning into a feast for all births: of males and females.^[8]