Langosco

At Langosco the border is decided by the river, and the river changes its mind. The Sesia has shifted its bed more than once, first forming great loops and then taking a straight course again, and each time it has carried pieces of land from one bank to the other: so today the comune has an enclave on the right bank, inside the territory of Motta de' Conti, in Piedmont, while that Piedmontese comune keeps the hamlet of Mantie and its lands on the left bank, between Langosco and Candia. The village is old: the Roman finds towards the river suggest it stood on the road that went from Cozzo into Gaul over the Cottian Alps, and in 882 the emperor Charles the Fat gave it to the bishop of Vercelli. The local lords were the palatine counts of Lomello, whose main line took the name of Langosco; when the counts tried to turn the fief into a lordship, the men of Vercelli and their bishop crossed the Sesia with an army and in 1254 destroyed the village. The lordship ended in 1315, when Riccardino Langosco died in a Visconti attack.

The seventeenth century here is a list of misfortunes: the plague of 1630, then the wars between French and Spanish, with the village sacked and burnt in 1659 by the troops of the duke of Noailles and again in 1696, first by the Germans and then by the Franco-Piedmontese. The river did its part too: in the fifteenth century a flood carried away the fortress that guarded the border and brought down the churches of San Salvatore and Santa Maria. The church of San Martino, remade at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was ruined again by the fighting, and in 1780 the authorities forbade its use; the new one was built between 1815 and 1824 to a design by the Casale architect Giovanni Antonio Vigna, with a neoclassical front and, in the lunette above the door, the fresco of Saint Martin who gives away his cloak and makes summer bloom again. A little outside the village, at Santa Maria Bagnolo, there was from the year one thousand a Benedictine monastery, recognised in 1216 by Innocent III as a dependency of San Michele della Chiusa: it became a farm, but the Romanesque apse of its little church can still be seen from the road.