Vinovo's parish church was born in 1451 out of the enlargement of the Della Rovere private chapel: the old church, the thirteenth-century San Desiderio, stood outside the village and no longer sufficed. Rebuilt at the start of the seventeenth century, it was destroyed by fire on 4 August 1630, during the war of Monferrato, and put up again in the course of the same century.
What to see
The interior has three naves, the central one barrel-vaulted and the side ones groin-vaulted. Among the works are two twelfth-century high reliefs of Christ in Majesty and the Virgin, a wooden bust of Christ carved in the fifteenth century, a wooden crucifix of the seventeenth probably given by cardinal Della Rovere, a Tuscan-school canvas of the Annunciation and a Nativity altarpiece of 1584.
Visiting
The church is in the centre, a short way from the castle: the two are seen together, and rightly so, because it is out of the castle that this parish church was born. The two-order façade was reworked at the end of the nineteenth century to a design by Crescentino Caselli and restored again between 2017 and 2018.
Our editors' tip
Look for the wooden statue of the Madonna del Rivoletto: tradition says it was found in 1330 in a field near the village. It is the object in here that has a story, and not merely a date.