Castellazzo Novarese

Castellazzo Novarese lies where the Novara plain ends and the hills begin, in country cut by mostly man-made waters: the Alto Novarese branch canal and the cavo Ospedale, or di Fara, fed by the roggia Mora. In earlier centuries the place was called Camodeia, after the family of milites who held it, and its centre was the pieve of Santa Maria, already named in 962, which in the twelfth century served the whole district.

From the second half of the fourteenth century people preferred the safety of the castle, and the pieve declined for centuries: closed in the late nineteenth century, it was largely pulled down in 1902; only stretches of wall remain. The Da Camodeia stronghold had passed in the early fifteenth century to the Caccia da Mandello, rich Novara men who rebuilt it at the end of that century, raising the rocca at the south-west corner; their arms are still frescoed on the road front. The comune's arms show a silver castle over a field charged with three flaming brands.