Vezzolano, Romanesque and nature

Guided tour of the Vezzolano Rectory complex, discovering one of the jewels of Italian and European Romanesque architecture.

History

Theorigin of Vezzolano’s monumental complex is uncertain.

A very similar legend concerning the Sacra di San Michele speaks of landslides that damaged the church built on the site opposite the present one.

Materials were recovered to rebuild it further upstream, but a second landslide moved them downstream and the fact was considered a divine sign, so that the church rose where God had indicated.

A third landslide irreparably damaged the castle and obliterated the place where the first church existed.

In the 1900s, the estate, formerly owned by Edoardo Serafino, a prominent lawyer and secretary of the Agricultural Consortium of Turin, was donated by his sister Camilla Serafino in 1926 to the Agricultural Academy of Turin.

Accepting the donation “consisting of civil and rustic buildings including the famous cloister [dell’abbazia] as well as land for various crops,” the Academy pledged to establish on the estate a school for theoretical practical agricultural instruction named after Giacomo Filippo Serafino.

In 1938 the entire monumental complex was acquired by the Ministry of National Education, General Directorate of Antiquities and Fine Arts, from which it has come over time to the present Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

In 2015 the complex was entrusted to the Polo Museale del Piemonte, a peripheral structure of the National Museums Directorate of the MIBACT.