Occhieppo Superiore

The town's old arms show an eye above a prison, and they tell the etymology people give here: local tradition holds there were Roman prisons, and the name would come from the Latin cippus, the stocks that kept prisoners from escaping — "an eye, a watch on the stocks", as Casalis wrote. Modern linguistic studies lean instead towards a Roman or Celtic personal name.

In the twelfth century the town was fortified with a rocca and other defences: they were meant to shield Vercelli from forces loyal to Barbarossa coming from the Canavese. Those works were destroyed in 1527. Pliny the Elder and Strabo record that in Roman times gold was dug in the Biella country, and taken from the rivers too.