The Romanesque church of San Maurizio is the oldest and most important monument in Gravellona Toce: its existence is documented from the tenth century onwards. It is built of blocks of local stone, and some of those blocks were not quarried but taken from a Roman tower that stood nearby. Not far off remain the walls of the now lost castle of Cerro, which once stood right beside the church.
What to see
Outside, the walls are decorated with hanging arches, the classic mark of Lombard Romanesque, but the windows are no longer the original ones: in place of the old single-light openings there are now wide rectangular ones. Inside there is a single nave; the cross vaults that covered it, a fifteenth-century addition, have recently been replaced by exposed trusses. Fifteenth-century frescoes have come back to light on the walls, hidden under a layer of lime and released by the restoration work carried out by Mesturino in 1925. On the northern flank stands the bell tower, detached from the body of the church but connected to it: the lower part seems to date from the last decades of the eleventh century, while the belfry with the octagonal dome above it is a nineteenth-century addition.
Visiting
The first thing you notice on arrival is that the bell tower leans. Not slightly, and it is plain to the naked eye from the road: the base is braced by a stone spur that holds it up. This is how the church has presented itself for centuries, and together with the peeling plaster of the front it suggests a building that has crossed time without much ceremony. The two parts of the tower can be told apart by colour and by the texture of the stone: Romanesque below, nineteenth-century belfry above.
Our editors' tip
Do not expect a monumental church: San Maurizio is small, it sits at the edge of the road, and drivers going past see it and carry on. That is exactly what makes it interesting. It is worth stopping for the hanging arches under the eaves, which are the ones from a thousand years ago, and for the thought of the people who built it by dismantling a Roman tower and reusing its stones: an entirely ordinary act in the Middle Ages, and the reason the walls have that irregular surface. Anyone who wants to measure how much the village has changed should compare this church with the parish church of San Pietro, at the other end of the built-up area.