The church of Santa Maria Assunta at Mosso carries a founding date that hides three others. The present building goes back to 1650, but it replaces a place of worship put up in 1326, which in turn stood on the remains of a thirteenth-century church destroyed by Fra' Dolcino, the heretic whose headquarters lay in the mountains around Mosso.
What to see
Only one piece of that old church survives, and it is the piece worth the trip: the late Romanesque bell tower, which came through every later rebuilding. The rest is the product of two centuries of building sites: the church of 1650 was in fact only completed fifty years later, in 1705, and was then further transformed between 1732 and 1734.
Visiting
The front you see today belongs to none of those phases: facade and pronaos were remade in neoclassical style in 1875. It announces a period quite different from the bell tower's, and the distance between the two is the most interesting thing about the building: Romanesque stone on one side, nineteenth-century columns and pediment on the other.
Our editors' tip
The detail to look for is the bell tower, and the reason it stands there alone. The mountains around Mosso were Fra' Dolcino's headquarters, and this church carries the mark of that story directly: it was rebuilt in 1326 over the ruins that episode had left, and rebuilt again in 1650.
