Chiesa di Santa Maria alla Bicocca

On the old road out of Novara towards Milan stands Santa Maria alla Bicocca, completed in 1658 around a much older wayside shrine. The little chapel known as the chapel of the Spaniards gave the church its soul: its Madonna and Child still crowns the high altar, framed now by baroque altars and warm wooden furnishings.

Why it matters

Santa Maria alla Bicocca preserves the history of one of Novara's roadside shrines. Before the church existed, a small chapel called the chapel of the Spaniards stood here on the road towards Milan, housing a venerated image of the Madonna and Child; Spanish troops and pilgrims moving along the Milan road gave the shrine its name. When the present church was finished in 1658, the community built around the image rather than replacing it, and that painting remains the altarpiece of the high altar today, set within a wooden frame of Renaissance taste. The building records both the devotional life of the seventeenth-century countryside-road interface and the military geography of a borderland where Spanish and, later, Austrian armies passed — the surrounding district gave its name to the nearby battle of Bicocca of 23 March 1849.

What to notice

The high altar holds the ancient Madonna and Child, once venerated in the chapel of the Spaniards and set within a carved wooden aureole of Renaissance style. Around it, the church shows a coherent seventeenth-century interior: baroque altars of coloured marble and gilding, and wooden furnishings — choir stalls, confessional and sacristy fittings — that local craftsmanship produced for working parishes of the era. The architecture is sober rather than spectacular; the building preserves the character of a small rural Baroque church. The setting matters too: the church fronts Corso XXIII Marzo 1849, the street named for the battle fought on the Bicocca outskirts during the first war of independence.

Context and history

The church was completed in 1658 on the site of the earlier chapel, which had stood on the road leading from Novara towards Milan — one of the historic arteries along which armies, merchants and pilgrims moved between the Milanese state and Piedmont. The continuity of the Marian image from chapel to high altar made the new church a direct heir of the roadside cult rather than a break with it. The locality's later history is martial: on 23 March 1849 the battle of Novara — also called the battle of Bicocca — ended the first Italian war of independence on these outskirts, and the modern street name keeps that memory. The church forms part of Novara's heritage of Baroque sacred buildings.