Carpignano Sesia

The village still holds its castello-ricetto, the fortified enclosure raised in the eleventh century by the counts of Pombia and later of Biandrate: the walls, houses of brick and river cobbles laid in herringbone, the ravelin beside the gate where the drawbridge once was, the stump of a tower house and a few windows still edged in terracotta.

Inside one of the buildings stands a wooden press of 1575, the oldest in Piedmont, which pressed grapes, walnuts and rapeseed for centuries. The deconsecrated church of San Pietro keeps twelfth-century Romanesque frescoes: Christ Pantocrator fills the apse, and below him the row of Apostles, cut through by two small windows opened later in the wall.