In upper Valsesia, where the Gronda meets the Sorba, Rassa has kept the building patterns of the old mountain villages. Above the village open the two main valleys, the Sorba and the Gronda, and off the latter branch the Val Sassolenda and the Valle di Vasnera, which leads over its pass into the Valle Artogna, already in the municipality of Campertogno. People here are called rassesi, though the historically sounder form would be rassotti.
In the fourteenth century the heretic Dolcino of Novara preached through this country, and to the same century tradition assigns the episode the municipality put on its arms: a wolf carried off Pietro in the woods, the only son of Emiliano Fassola, who had fought the heretics, and himself the future head of the Valsesian militia; the wolf left him unharmed in Val Sorba, near the spring called della Rotta, and the rescue was credited to Saint Maiolus, whose local cult begins there. The arms show the wolf standing with the swaddled baby in its jaws, a rock with a stream running from it and, behind, a snowy ridge of three peaks.
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📅 Every year, on 3 May (Saint Joseph on the second Sunday of August)
On 3 May Rassa, a municipality of 66 inhabitants in the province of Vercelli, celebrates its patron the Holy Cross, to whom the parish church is dedicated; Saint Joseph is co-patron.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Rassa, but an easy day trip away.
