The sanctuary of Sant'Anna stands on the height of Montrigone, the old Monte Rigone, where in the fourteenth century a castle of the counts of Biandrate still rose, later pulled down by a popular revolt against the levies imposed by the feudal lords. Today the hill lies inside Borgosesia. The sanctuary was born of a vow made during the plague of 1629-1631, and it was raised by the community of the town, spurred on by a miller, Gian Battista Daij known as Paniga, who took the organising and the paying upon himself: at first it was dedicated to the Madonna delle Grazie, to Saint Roch and to Saint Mark.
What to see
The climb to the sanctuary runs among pines and passes fourteen shrines, the stations of the Ascent to Calvary, put up in 1753 and frescoed by the Valsesian painter Lorenzo Peracino. Inside, six chapels open out, each on an episode from the life of the Virgin, peopled altogether by some 150 statues in polychrome terracotta; the dome is decorated with the Assumption of Mary and works as a chapel of Paradise, on the model of the one at the sacro monte of Crea. Other groups stand outside, under the arches and in niches cut into the rock: the dead Christ, the penitent Magdalen, Saint John the Baptist.
Visiting
The complex has been called the gateway to the sacro monte of Varallo, and the phrase says well what you are looking at: a pre-Alpine sacro monte on a reduced scale, of the same family as those that between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries filled the hills of Piedmont and Lombardy with statues. The design of the church, very plain in structure, is probably by Giovanni d'Enrico, the great modeller who was working at Varallo in those years; the statue groups were certainly entrusted to him, by then eighty years old. To carry out the commission he moved here in 1640 with his workshop, run by his pupil and partner Giacomo Ferro, where Ferro's brothers Giovanni and Antonio also worked.
Our editors' tip
Stop in the chapels of the Annunciation and the Visitation. The Montrigone statues show a certain roughness here and there, the sign of work done quickly and largely by the workshop; but in some faces and certain gestures the intensity suddenly changes register, and you recognise the master's hand and, behind it, what Gaudenzio Ferrari had left in Valsesia.