A parish church dedicated to Saint Peter was already recorded at Gattinara in 1147. The building was rebuilt from 1470, and in 1529 cardinal Mercurino Arborio di Gattinara, grand chancellor of the emperor Charles V, provided in his will for a house of Lateran Canons Regular to be founded here.
What to see
Of the fifteenth-century church only the base of the bell tower and the facade survive, decorated with brick friezes on Lombard Gothic models common in the Vercelli area. Look at the panels of the three carved baroque wooden doors: they show the patron saints of the oratories of the villages whose merger produced the town. The interior, by contrast, is nineteenth-century, built on the repetition of a circular module for nave, presbytery, choir and sacristy, marked by great arches and clusters of columns.
Visiting
The side chapels are where the furnishings of the older church ended up. On the left open the scurolo of San Benedetto, designed in 1834 by Pietro Delmastro, which keeps in a wooden urn the saint's bones brought from the Roman catacomb of San Callisto, and the oratory of the confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, which holds the original wooden statue of the Virgin of Rado: the sanctuary that bears her name now has a copy. Of the convent the cardinal wanted, the sixteenth-century cloister survives, with stone columns and carved capitals.
Our editors' tip
The story to know is the one about the tomb. Mercurino died suddenly at Innsbruck in 1530, and by his own will was buried at the foot of the high altar precisely so as to be walked over during services, as a sign of humility. The tombstone was destroyed during the French occupation and never remade; in 1899 the remains were moved to a new tomb. Above it all, since 1884, stands Giuseppe Locarni's dome of iron and brick.