What to see · Villadossola

More places of interest

• Oratorio San Maurizio

  These ruins keep a plague in their geometry. The oratory, Romanesque of the eleventh century, had a rectangular hall and a semicircular apse; after the plague of 1630 it was restructured, and on that occasion the round apse was squared off. The simpler and cheaper shape took the place of the curved one, and that is how it is still seen.

  What to see

  Little, and in poor condition: this is a ruin. The little bell tower stands apart from the church, in the old manner, and is slightly later than the original building; it too is much decayed. Even so, it is one of the oldest buildings in this part of the Ossola.

  It stands south of the built-up area of Villadossola, which from the end of the eighteenth century became a town of iron and steel: a smith from Intra set up furnaces and hammers here to work the ore mined in the Antrona valley, and from that came the blast furnace, the rolling mills and the factories. This ruined oratory is the oldest thing in a town that went into an entirely different trade.

  Visiting

  The remains are in open country south of the centre of Villadossola, in the province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola; there is no ticket and no timetable, and you get there on foot. A quarter of an hour.

  Our editors' tip

  Look at the bell tower and the church as two separate things, because they are. In the early centuries the bell tower was built detached from the building: it was a tower, not an accessory. Here the separation reads perfectly well precisely because both are ruined, and no restoration suggests a link that was never there.

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