Sant'Angelo Lomellina has 864 inhabitants in the western Lomellina, on the right bank of the Agogna. It used to be called Castel Sant'Angelo, and the first nucleus grew around a fortified enclosure built to defend the monasteries scattered in the surrounding countryside; in the sixth century the village gave birth to Fortunato, bishop of Vercelli, who died in 580. At the edge of the built-up area, near the cemetery, stands the church of San Rocco, which in the eleventh century was dedicated to Santa Maria delle Grazie and served as a shelter for pilgrims on the Via Francigena.
That little church is the reason to stop. Its inner walls are frescoed from top to bottom, a cycle without equal in the Lomellina, painted between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by several artists of the Vercelli and Mortara schools who have remained anonymous; only two paintings, on either side of the altar, carry a signature, that of Tommasino da Mortara. The building is tiny, a little over eleven metres by eight, with its original floor of broken tile, and it has an oddity: the vault of the apse is more than four metres higher than the vault of the church. Outside the village, in an abandoned bend of the Sesia, sixteen hectares of alder wood and reed bed have become a heronry, where night herons and little egrets nest.
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Near Sant'Angelo Lomellina
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