The church of Santa Maria Assunta is the parish church of Bussoleno and belongs to the diocese of Susa. A church here is recorded as early as 1158: it was Romanesque and depended on the pieve of Santa Maria Maggiore in Susa. By the early eighteenth century it was unsafe, so in 1724 it was demolished and the following year work began on the new parish church, designed by the architect Francesco de Willencourt; it was finished in 1739.
What to see
The front faces southeast and is marked off by six pilaster strips resting on high bases and carrying the entablature and the triangular pediment. At the centre is the portal under a curved crowning, and above it a rectangular window; at the sides two niches that were left empty. The bell tower, set against the church, has a square base and is divided into several registers by cornices, with hanging arches; the belfry opens with a three-light window on each side and is topped by a pyramidal spire. Inside there is a single nave, with the side chapels entered under round arches and a barrel vault with lunettes.
Visiting
There are two works to look for, and they are far apart in time: a wooden crucifix carved in the fifteenth century, older therefore than the building that holds it, and the organ built in the eighteenth century by Gioacchino Concone, a contemporary of the church. In 1835 two pulpits and two confessionals were added; in the nineteen-sixties the front and the outer surfaces were restored, and in the following decade came the ambo and the altar table facing the congregation.
Our editors' tip
Look at the decoration thinking of how long it took. Luigi Morgari began it in 1915 and had to break off almost at once, because the First World War broke out. It stayed there unfinished for twenty-eight years: it was completed only in 1943, by Giorgio Lauro Boasso, that is in the middle of the Second. A village church that takes two world wars to get itself painted says something about the twentieth century that many memorials do not.