Out in the fields, among the rows of poplars, stands the pieve of Velezzo: a few low farm buildings around a church and a baptistery, in a place where nobody lives any more. According to some historians it was the first Christian centre of the Lomellina, just outside Lomello and close to the road that led into Gaul. In 1460 the bishop's vicar already found it reduced to a ruin. The baptistery, of the eleventh century, is the remarkable thing: circular in plan, its walls laid in herringbone courses of brick with Roman fragments set back into them. For a time it was used as a bedroom and cellar for the priest's house. What brought it back to notice was, in 1966, an article by Mario Soldati.
Today's comune is the sum of three of yesterday's. Terno, whose name comes from the Latin and says where it stood, one mile from Lomello, was abolished in 1759; Campalestro, which had belonged to the Maletti and then to the Ghislieri, stayed independent until 1818; and Velezzo, of which nothing is known before the nineteenth century except the story of its pieve. Out in the fields, on the right bank of the Agogna, stands the sanctuary of the Madonna dal Soc, of the log: it was built, legend says, where a deaf and dumb girl saw the Madonna on a tree trunk floating in the river, and on returning home told the whole story.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Velezzo Lomellina
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
