San Tommaso is the parish church of Canelli and appears in public deeds as early as the twelfth century. The church you see today is largely a rebuilding of the second half of the seventeenth century, enlarged at the end of the nineteenth with the addition of the lantern tower, the presbytery and the apse.
What to see
Inside are furnishings and baroque canvases of real quality. In the right nave stand the Nativity by Sebastiano Taricco, the monumental Assumption altarpiece of 1785 attributed to Carlo Gorzio of Moncalvo, and the Immaculate Conception by the local painter Giancarlo Aliberti (1670-1727). In the left nave are the seventeenth-century baroque stuccoes of the side chapels and another Aliberti canvas, the Death of Saint Joseph. The baptistery chapel keeps Renaissance marble sculptures that come from the funerary mausoleum of the Scarampi marquises, lords of the place, later dismantled.
Visiting
The church is in the centre and takes half an hour, but it is worth looking at it with one idea in mind: it was the town's civic church, built at the expense of the Comune, not a lordly or monastic foundation. That explains why its history is entangled with that of the administration rather than with that of a family.
Our editors' tip
Raise your eyes to the bell tower before going in. At the top stands the emblem of the Dog, which for more than half a millennium has been the coat of arms and symbol of Canelli: it is up there precisely because the church belonged to the community. It is the detail that ties the building to the town's name better than any plaque.