SACRA DI SAN MICHELE. - Popular name of an ancient Benedictine abbey, in the diocese of Susa, built on a spur (Monte Pirchiriano, 916 m) at the mouth of the Segusina Valley, near the place where Desiderius blocked the pass against Charlemagne (its true name is S. Michele delle Chiuse; in the Middle Ages it was called coenobium Clusinum).
Its origin goes back to the end of the 10th century, when Hugues le Décousu de Montboissier, a nobleman of Auvergne, having to erect a monastery in fulfillment of a penitential injunction of the Pope (John XIV or XV, according to some: but more probably Sylvester II), founded it near a small church dedicated to the archangel Michael, built or rather restored a few years earlier by St. John Vincent, formerly bishop of a city in the territory of Ravenna, who had withdrawn into hermit life on Monte Caprasio, facing Pirchiriano.
Already with the first abbot (Avverto) the abbey rose to notable importance, which increased especially under the government of Benedict I (early 11th century), Benedict II (d. 1091, founder of the abbey school and teacher of the monk William, chronicler of Chiusa), William I (early 12th century), Stephen (mid-12th century), Elias (first half of the 13th century), and reached its greatest splendor (about 300 monks, 140 churches and abbeys under its jurisdiction) with Rodolfo di Mombello (d. 1359). In the second half of the 14th century a rapid decline set in, beginning with the simoniacal election to the abbatial seat of Peter III (1362) and culminating in 1381 with the passage to the commendatory regime, urged by Amadeus VI of Savoy to curb the corruption of the monks. The commendam was for various years, during the 16th century, the appanage of the Ferrero, a noble family of Biella; it also fell several times to the Savoys, and at the request of Emmanuel Philibert Pope Gregory XV suppressed the monastic community, assigning the revenues of the abbey to the erection of the collegiate church of Giaveno, under whose custody the monastery remained. Charles Felix chose the crypt of the church as the burial place of the members of a lateral branch of the house of Savoy. In 1803 the territory was transferred by Pius VII under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Turin, and finally in 1836 Gregory XVI established the Rosminians there.
Of the building complex, irregular by the very nature of the site and by the overlapping of architectural vicissitudes, the church and the so-called "sepulcher of the monks" are notable, a building with a circular plan of the Romanesque age, now in ruins. The church consists of three distinct phases: the crypt, perhaps identifiable with the little church of St. John Vincent; the three Romanesque apses (of which the central one is wider) resting on enormous substructures 23 m high, dating from the 12th century; the body, of the 14th century, in Gothic style. The access, through a stairway cut into the rock ("scalone dei morti"), is interesting for the "gate of the zodiac," which bears the signature of a certain Nicolaus, identified by some, on account of certain affinities of sculptural motifs, with the author of the right portal of the cathedral of Piacenza.
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Alessandro Pratesi