Piverone

The name has nothing to do with that of neighbouring Viverone, close as the two sound: the likeliest guess is a Roman owner nicknamed Pipero for his peppery temper, and a Villa Piperonis long gone. A seventeenth-century document gives Peveronis a pepper tree as its emblem, but in 1926, no drawing of it being found, the Savoy cross was chosen.

In the thirteenth century the consuls of Vercelli walled the village with three towers; the gate tower still carries the clock. At Livione stand the walls of the Gesiùn, a Romanesque church of the tenth century: river cobbles and courses of brick, the bell gable still standing, vines all round.