The first nucleus of Volpiano's parish church was founded, at the beginning of the eleventh century, by Saint William of Volpiano: the same man who raised the abbey of Fruttuaria on his family's land. The church appears in Henry II's document of 1014, and from 1003 the churches of the area had passed under Fruttuaria, which meant they depended on no bishop.
What to see
What you see today is a nineteenth-century church: work began in 1857 and ended in 1880, with the consecration on 12 October of that year. The gabled façade is divided by four pilaster strips with pinnacles; at the centre the splayed doorway has a pointed lunette decorated in mosaic, above it the rose window and higher still a niche with the Virgin and Child.
Visiting
The interior has three naves and eight bays; the last two form the presbytery, raised in two stages and closed by the apse, where the stained glass shows Saints Peter and Paul. The painted decoration is by Luigi Morgari and Enrico Reffo. The bell tower is divided into five orders, with a two-light window on each side at the fourth and a clock in the belfry, and ends in a hexagonal spire.
Our editors' tip
It is worth holding the dates together: a bull of Clement IV from 1265 states that the church was formally in the diocese of Ivrea but in fact still depended on the abbey. The presbytery was enlarged in 1824, and thirty years later it was decided to start again from scratch.