The church of San Bartolomeo stands just outside the built-up area of Villadossola, on the road to Domodossola, near the bridge over the Ovesca. It was built towards the end of the tenth century, while the tall bell tower, worked with greater care and a finer ornament, is some decades later. The building technique is so skilful that it suggests the Comacine masters, the men who gave Lombard Romanesque its character. The Touring Club's Guida rossa calls it the best example of Romanesque architecture in the Ossola.
What to see
The material is beola, the local stone, laid in regular blocks and decorated with pilaster strips, very fine half-columns and rows of hanging arches. The apse is divided into three bays by strips of stone slabs, and under the roof runs a series of arches, five to a bay; the wall above the apse repeats the same motifs, with five panels and a small cruciform window at the centre. The bell tower reaches thirty-four metres counting the cross on top, tapers as it rises and spreads over seven floors single-light windows below, two- and three-light windows higher up. In the lunette of the front door sits a slab from the primitive building, incised with a cross and with mysterious zig-zag marks; other incisions are found on the corbels that carry the arches.
Visiting
The first historical record is a document of 1289, where the church is dedicated to Saints Fabian and Sebastian, invoked against the plagues of men and of animals; only from the middle of the fourteenth century does it carry the name of Saint Bartholomew, who is the patron of Villadossola. It began as a single nave with a semicircular apse, and in the sixteenth century it was widened to three naves by knocking down the perimeter walls: the old nave, now the central one, was lengthened by four and a half metres and given a barrel vault. Inside, the wooden altarpiece that backs the high altar is a copy: the original, dated 1596 and the work of Andrea Merzagora da Craveggia, was stolen in 1979 and replaced with a piece by Eugenio Bonelli, remade from photographs. On the apse walls fragments of fifteenth-century frescoes remain.
Our editors' tip
The most interesting things are low down and have to be looked for. On the corbels of the arches and on some panels of the outer walls there are incisions that recur in three types: a branching tree, a semicircle with solar symbols inside it, a Saint Andrew's cross with two horizontal lines beneath. They are marks that have led to the suggestion of a very old settlement here and of a church built over an earlier pagan place of worship. There is no way of saying with certainty what they mean, and that is exactly why it is worth walking slowly round the apse.