Cappella dei Mercanti, Baroque chapel in central Turin, Italy
Cappella dei Mercanti is a baroque chapel in central Turin featuring a rectangular layout with ornately decorated walls and ceilings. The interior contains 17th-century paintings, carved wooden statues, and marble details arranged throughout the space.
The chapel was built in the late 1600s for the Pious Congregation of Bankers, Merchants and Traders established in 1663. It reflects the growing wealth and influence of these professional groups in the city.
The chapel served as a meeting place for Turin's merchant and banking community, which explains its elaborate decoration and valuable artworks. This investment in beauty shows how much this professional group valued their gathering space.
The chapel is typically accessible only during weekend mass services, so check ahead if you want to visit. The interior is quite small, so it gets crowded during services, and visiting outside of mass times offers a better experience.
The sacristy holds Giovanni Plana's Perpetual Calendar, a mechanical device with rotating cylinders and gears designed to calculate dates across thousands of years. This intricate mechanism reveals the technical skill applied to religious spaces during that era.
The community of curious travelers
AroundUs brings together thousands of curated places, local tips, and hidden gems, enriched daily by 60,000 contributors worldwide.
