Civiasco

Civiasco — Civiasch in the Valsesia dialect — lies in the small valley of the Pascone stream, on the left bank of the Valsesia. Its look comes from a disaster: a fire in 1779 destroyed almost the whole village. Those who rebuilt it had made money in the Iberian peninsula, where many locals emigrated in the eighteenth century, and brought home Hispano-Moorish forms still legible among the houses. The parish church dates from the seventeenth century.

Emma Morano was born here, the oldest living person in the world between 2016 and 2017 and the last woman alive born in the nineteenth century. The town hall holds the civic museum Ercole Durio founded in 1903, with artefacts, weapons and furnishings from the valley. The arms show an eagle, wings spread, on two green mounts before a snowy range, above a battlemented castle on a truncated rock.