The Torrione, Triùn to the people of Aranco, is the most visible trace left by the counts of Biandrate in the lower Valsesia. It is a squat, dark building some fifteen metres high, square in plan, made of stones from the Sesia and rubble from Monte Aronne, put up around 1150 on the river bank. Aranco, which grew up around it, appears as Auranchum in a document of 23 November 1217, when the representatives of the Valsesia villages had to swear a pact of citizenship to Vercelli; it remained an independent comune until 1928.
What to see
The tower can be read entirely from outside: square plan, masonry of river cobbles and local stone, few openings, no decorative concessions. It was a working building before it was a military one. In peacetime it served very effectively as a tax office and customs post for goods moving from one bank of the Sesia to the other; in wartime it acted as lookout and small fort, and for many years it guaranteed the safety of the inhabitants of Aranco. The two functions explain its shape: tall enough to see a long way along the river, solid enough to hold out through a short siege.
Visiting
Aranco is no picture-postcard village and does not pretend to be one: the tower sits inside a fabric of houses and workshops, and you have to look for it. Around 1400 the hamlet saw the birth of the oratory of San Rocco in the Vespino area, where the Valsesia roads crossed those of the Valsessera: flocks converged there every year for shearing and buyers came in from the Biella district, so that Aranco earned a name as the valley's wool market. Between 1880 and 1933 the village was the terminus of the steam tramway that came up from Vercelli. The tower is looked at from the street: it is not a museum and it has no opening hours.
Our editors' tip
The battles the people of Aranco remember were not fought here but at the Bocchetto, the pass towards the Valsessera: in 1377 against the men of Crevacuore and Guardabosone over old quarrels about border pastures, and in 1617 between Piedmontese militias and the Spanish troops of Don Sancho da Lima y Rosa. The Valsesians won both times. It is worth keeping that in mind while looking at the Triùn: this was not a frontier stronghold, it was control of a crossing and a toll in a valley that defended itself.