Chiesa di Ognissanti

Of the eleven religious buildings that Bishop Litifredo listed in 1124, only one still stands: Ognissanti, Novara's last surviving Romanesque parish. Stripped of baroque additions in a mid-twentieth-century restoration, it keeps an octagonal tiburio, Angera stone capitals and painted fragments — a rare, austere survivor in a baroque city.

Why it matters

Novara's historic centre is largely a baroque and neoclassical city, which makes Ognissanti's survival decisive for reading its earlier layers. The church appears in documents of 1124, when Bishop Litifredo enumerated eleven religious buildings in the city, and again in 1132 among the properties confirmed to the bishop by Pope Innocent II. Every other church on that twelfth-century list has disappeared; Ognissanti alone remains, even though its Romanesque body was heavily remodelled before being brought back toward its original form. The church preserves the proportions and materials of a twelfth-century parish church on its original plot.

What to notice

The exterior shows the restoration's results clearly: a gabled facade with corbels supporting hanging arches that run right around the building, and an octagonal tiburio — the raised lantern over the crossing — pierced by paired and single windows. Inside, three naves are divided into four bays each with cross vaults, and a transept that does not project beyond the side walls. The pillars stand on square monolithic bases with capitals carved from Angera stone and decorated with stylised motifs, a material feature of medieval building around Lake Maggiore. Painting survives in fragments — frescoes in the apse and a small panel fragment of the Madonna del latte, the nursing Madonna, attributed to Daniele de Bosis — while two eighteenth-century angel heads above the apse throne survived even the purist restoration.

Context and history

The church was built in full conformity with its twelfth-century moment as a Romanesque parish. Over the following centuries it accumulated changes: the facade and the double vault of the tiburio were substantially altered in the baroque period, when frescoes by Lorenzo Peretti were painted into the composition. By the twentieth century the building was a palimpsest of styles. Between 1953 and 1960 a radical restoration removed the later additions and recovered the primitive Romanesque physiognomy; the surviving Baroque fragments were consciously retained as evidence.