Salasco

Salasco is a rice-growing village west of Vercelli, and its coat of arms says nothing else: a red brick tower with a blue roof and, beside it, two crossed ears of rice and two of wheat. The parish church of San Giacomo was raised at the start of the fourteenth century, and the clock on its bell tower came from a Turin workshop of brothers who signed themselves oriuolai meccanici. The Santhià to Vercelli stage of the via Francigena crosses the fields, and the hamlet of Selve holds one of the courtyard farmsteads typical of this landscape.

At Selve, in 1949, part of Bitter Rice was filmed, with Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman. Two names have travelled out of this village of a few hundred people: Giuseppe Cominetti, a divisionist painter born here, who worked in Genoa and then in Paris and for a while kept company with Marinetti's futurists; and general Carlo Canera di Salasco, chief of staff of the Sardinian army, who in 1848 signed with the Austrians the armistice that carries his name.