The preceptory of Sant'Antonio di Ranverso was founded by the hospitaller order of Saint Anthony of Vienne at the mouth of the Susa valley, in the closing years of the twelfth century, at the wish of count Umberto III of Savoy. The name joins the dedication to Saint Anthony Abbot to the place name rivus inversus, a canal that ran north of the nearby morainic hills. The donation of the land to the canons is documented in 1188: they were to make of it a hospice for pilgrims and at the same time a refuge for those struck by Saint Anthony's fire.
What to see
The church is late Gothic of French influence, recognisable by the three gables over the portals, decorated with terracotta tiles and closed by pinnacles. On the left flank, though wholly contained within the body of the church, rises the bell tower with three storeys of two-light windows, four pinnacles and a fourteenth-century octagonal spire. Of the hospital only the fifteenth-century front remains, with its terracotta gable. Inside, the central nave and the two aisles are marked off by compound piers alternating with wide chapels under pointed cross vaults.
Visiting
The frescoes are the chief reason to come: Giacomo Jaquerio painted them in the second decade of the fifteenth century and they are held to be one of the masterpieces of Piedmontese late Gothic. There is the story of the life of Saint Blaise, the Madonna enthroned among saints, the Nativity, the stories of Saint Anthony Abbot; and in the sacristy a signed cycle of the life of Christ, taking in an Annunciation, Saints Peter and Paul, the Agony in the Garden, the evangelists on the vault webs and, in the lunette, the celebrated Road to Calvary. In the apse there is also a polyptych by Defendente Ferrari of 1531, made as a votive offering by nearby Moncalieri during the plague of that year.
Our editors' tip
This place stands here for a practical reason: it was a stage on the Via Francigena, on both routes coming down from the Mont Cenis and the Montgenèvre before reaching Rivoli and Turin. Those who arrived sick found care, and in the great plague of the fourteenth century the hospital isolated the infected and treated their sores with pig fat: that is why Saint Anthony Abbot is always painted with a pig at his side. Keep it in mind as you look at the saint's stories on the walls. After the order was suppressed, in 1776 pope Pius VI assigned everything to the Order of Saint Maurice, which still owns it; the complex has been a national monument since 1883.