The church of San Bartolomeo is the parish church of Trino and is dedicated to the town's patron. It was built with three naves in the early thirteenth century, when the old pieve of San Michele in Insula, out in the fields, began to be abandoned in favour of the centre. It was badly damaged in 1628, during the fierce siege by the troops of Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, and was rebuilt almost from scratch between 1634 and 1642, this time with a single nave and a Latin cross plan. The front, in a sober classical manner, is the result of the remodelling of 1839.
What to see
The oldest piece is the fourteenth-century icon of the Madonna and Child, known as the Madonna di San Luca, which keeps distinctly Byzantine features: it was given to the church by the marquises of Montferrat of the Palaeologus house. From the Renaissance comes the triptych of the Immaculate Conception in the left transept, the work of Gerolamo Giovenone datable to 1516 and also known as the Raspa triptych after the family who commissioned it. Then there is a panel by Boniforte Oldoni the Younger with the Coronation of the Virgin and saints, of 1587, brought here from the nearby church of San Pietro Martire, and a sixteenth-century wooden crucifix in the chapel of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Visiting
One canvas deserves attention for a particular reason: it shows the Christ Child with Saint Joseph and the Madonna and is by Guglielmo Tabacchetti, son of that Jan de Wespin who was a great statuary at the Sacri Monti of Crea and Varallo. It is no masterpiece, but it is the only known work by its author. Piedmontese painting of the following centuries is represented by the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple by Orsola Caccia, daughter of Moncalvo, of 1648; by the large canvas in the choir with Saint Bartholomew baptising the royal family of Armenia, painted by Pier Francesco Guala of Casale between 1733 and 1734; and by the frescoes Luigi Morgari spread across the ceiling of the nave. The church also keeps the relics of the blessed Oglerio, abbot of Lucedio.
Our editors' tip
Look at the works in the order in which they arrived rather than the order in which they hang: the Palaeologus icon comes from the time when Trino was land of the marquises of Montferrat, the Giovenone triptych from the season when the Vercelli country was turning out first-rate painting, the Guala canvas from the Casale eighteenth century. This is a provincial parish church that absorbed, a century at a time, whatever passed through the district, including pictures from nearby churches as they closed. The Madonna di San Luca has been here for seven hundred years and survived the siege that destroyed everything else.