Vallanzengo

Vallanzengo is a scattered comune: its town hall sits not in any village of that name but in the frazione Trabbia, the houses strung out in a few hamlets up the hillside. The name likely comes from the Roman personal name Valentius, an early medieval form being Valanzengus; locally, though, the old folk read it in Piedmontese as "valley in the bosom". The land long hung on Bioglio: the bishops of Vercelli held it in the eleventh century, then the Avogadro di Quaregna, who submitted to Savoy in 1404.

Autonomy from Bioglio came by edict of Charles Emmanuel I in 1621, but dividing the high pastures dragged on in bitter dispute, and Vallanzengo came out of it with a broad upland reaching from the Bocchetto Sessera to the Sessera torrent; part of the comune is still an administrative island wedged among the mountain villages. The Foglia family gave an abbot who was confessor at the Spanish court in the seventeenth century, and the arms bear a squirrel in a tree over the motto "Piccolo ma franco".