The church stands at the centre of the quarter that shares its name. Tradition has it founded between the ninth and tenth centuries by Giuseppe Birillo of Novalesa, after the Saracens had destroyed his abbey, on top of an earlier pagan temple. The oldest part still standing is the pair of apses, from the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh; the bell tower and the enlargement for parish use come a century later.
What to see
The plan is Romanesque, with three naves, and Gothic decoration added in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first chapel on the left is from just after the middle of the fourteenth century, the second, known as the Magdalene chapel, from the second half of the fifteenth, and the crowning of the facade was completed by 1450. Inside are frescoes painted over four centuries: Saint James with the Virgin and other saints, Saint Andrew before the cross, Saint James entering a turreted city, a fragment of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes and, on the left wall of the central nave, what survives of a Madonna of Mercy.
Visiting
The surprise is in the end chapel of the smaller nave: a painting of 1480 in which the castle of Avigliana is recognised, by tradition and with good arguments. It was painted while the castle was still standing, two centuries before the French blew it up.
Our editors' tip
You now reach the church by a stairway of brick and stone built in 1842 to give it a stage setting: originally you entered from via San Pietro, on the side of the old well. It is worth walking round the building and looking at it from there too, because the flank tells the building phases better than the front does. The top of the bell tower, on the other hand, is nineteenth century: it was rebuilt between 1868 and 1869 after lightning brought it down.