Diocese of Alba Pompeia

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The diocese of Alba Pompeia comprises eighty towns in the civilian province of Cuneo and two in the province of Alexandria.^[1]^[2]

It is a suffragen of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Turin.^[3]

Heading the list of the bishops of Alba is a St. Dionysius, of whom we are told that after serving there for some years he became Archbishop of Milan. He was the Dionysius who so energetically opposed Arianism and was exiled in the year 355 by the Emperor Constans. Papebroch (Acta SS., VI, 40) disputes the reliability of this tradition, since a bishop of that period was forbidden to leave his diocese for another. A list of nine early bishops of Alba, from another St. Dionysius (380) down to a Bishop Julius (553), was compiled from sepulchral inscriptions found in the cathedral of alba towards the end of the fifteenth century by Dalmazzo Berendenco, an antiquarian. De Rossi, however, on examination proved it a forgery (Boll. di Arch. Crist., 1868, 45-47).

The first bishop of Alba of whose existence we are certain is Lampradius who was present at the synod held in Rome in 499 under Pope Symmachus (Mansi, VIII, 235, Mon. Germ. Hist., Auct. Antiq. XII, 400.) In the series of bishops, Benzo is notable as an adversary of Gregory VII and a partisan of the Empire in the struggle of the Investitures. (Orsi, "Un libellista del sec. XI", in "Rivista storica Italiana", 1884, p. 427.)