Rosazza

Rosazza, in the upper Cervo valley, is largely the work of one man. Federico Rosazza Pistolet, a senator of the Kingdom, once a member of Mazzini's Giovane Italia and Worshipful Grand Master of the Biella freemasonry, lost his wife and daughter, took up spiritualism and set out to remake his native village along esoteric lines. He turned to Giuseppe Maffei, an architect credited with mediumistic powers, said to take his instructions from the dead. The arms echo the name too: a gold tower with merlons, three stars and, on the green ground, a rose.

The castle was begun in 1883 with the tower and finished in 1899, the year Federico died, with the gallery for his paintings. Maffei built it on the aesthetics of the ruin: masonry deliberately broken and treated with nitric acid, false colonnades recalling the temples of Paestum; the entrance arch repeats the Etruscan one at Volterra and carries the heads of three women of the valley, a five-pointed star in their hair. The senator also had the old church pulled down to raise a Temple, with a chequerboard parvis of black and white pebbles and a ceiling painted as a starry sky, and cut a tunnel of 367 metres through the rock towards the sanctuary of Oropa.