Oleggio's parish church is the work of Alessandro Antonelli, the architect of the Mole in Turin, and is one of the Antonellian buildings of the Novara area. It was willed by archpriest Bertotti, who in 1840 began to think of a new church: the old one no longer served a town that had reached eight thousand souls.
What to see
The interior has three naves, with nine altars in the body of the church and three more serving as oratories for the confraternities: Saints Fabian and Sebastian above the sacristy, the Holy Rosary and Corpus Domini on the opposite side.
Visiting
One thing is missing: a bell tower. The church has none, and what people in Oleggio call the bell tower of the square is in fact a civic tower. The six bells sit above the choir loft and come from different castings: the two largest are by the Barigozzi brothers of Oleggio, from 1858, and the last one is from 2000.
Our editors' tip
The dates tell you how long it took: work began on 14 August 1853 and ended on 23 December 1858, but the consecration came only on 6 July 1868, ten years after the site closed.