Campertogno: Baroque grandeur on the road to Monte Rosa

Travellers driving up the Valsesia towards Alagna and the walls of Monte Rosa pass through Campertogno almost without warning: suddenly, above the river Sesia, rises a parish church of astonishing size for a mountain village of two hundred souls.

A church by great architects

The church of San Giacomo Maggiore, seat of a parish since 1415, owes its grandeur to the ambitions of a community grown prosperous and populous. At the end of the 17th century the famous Guarino Guarini sent a wooden model for a vast new church from his Turin workshop; judged too grand, the design was reworked by Filippo Juvarra, and the present building rose between 1720 and 1732 on an almost elliptical plan. Inside are a towering 17th-century pyramidal altar and paintings by Valsesian masters, while the adjoining museum of sacred art, entered through Guarini's chapel of Santa Marta, holds more than five hundred works.

Village of the upper valley

Once among the most populous places of the upper Valsesia, Campertogno spreads its ten hamlets along both banks of the young Sesia at 815 metres, joined by an old bridge, with paths climbing to alpine pastures and small mountain lakes above.

Getting there

Campertogno lies on the Valsesia road some twenty kilometres above Varallo, about an hour and three quarters from Milan or Turin, shortly before Alagna at the foot of Monte Rosa.