Chiesa parrocchiale di Sant'Eustachio

Up in the Chesalet hamlet above the Sarre plain stands the municipality's second parish church, a seventeenth-century building that keeps older souls: a fifteenth-century late-Gothic stone portal carved with the arms of Savoy, a medieval bell tower, and a small museum of liturgical silver and reliquaries gathered from the surrounding chapels.

Why it matters

Chesalet's church documents how the mountain hamlets of one small commune organised their own worship for centuries. Until 1783, Sarre and Chesallet were separate communes; this building served as the parish church of Chesallet. Architecturally it is a compact lesson in accumulation: a medieval bell tower and a late-Gothic portal survive inside what is otherwise a seventeenth-century baroque interior, and an 1811 wooden high altar by two Valsesia-born sculptors anchors the room. Its small internal museum, set up beside the entrance, preserves chalices, reliquaries and processional crosses from the dependent chapels of the parish — precisely the kind of parish-level patrimony that larger museums rarely retain in context.

What to notice

The fifteenth-century stone portal has jambs and a round arch framing a central shield of the Savoy coat of arms — a quiet assertion of dynastic allegiance carved into a hamlet church. The square-plan medieval bell tower carries windows that grow from single lights to paired and tripled as they rise, closed by a pyramidal roof. At the end of the eighteenth century, the old wooden roof structure was replaced by frescoed vaults. The high altar is the centrepiece: carved and assembled in 1811 by the sculptors Giuseppe Antonio Broccio and Giuseppe Antonio Gilardi, with a central painting of the Virgin and Child flanked by Saints Anthony, Joseph, John the Evangelist and Eustace, the patron of Chesallet, whose feast falls on 20 September. Two brackets in the presbytery carry statues of Saint Gratus and Saint Jocondus, the revered bishops of Aosta. To the left of the entrance, the small museum displays gilded candlestick angels from the Saint-Joconde chapel, two fifteenth-century chalices, seventeenth-century wooden cherubs, eighteenth-century urn-shaped reliquaries and three gilded processional crosses with fleur-de-lis finials.

Context and history

The parish of Saint Eustace at Chesallet is documented from the eighteenth century as an independent cure. The present church dates to the seventeenth century, while its late-Gothic portal and medieval bell tower preserve earlier fabric; the tower's precise date remains uncertain. The merger of Chesallet into Sarre in 1783, after which the combined commune briefly bore the name Sarre-Chesallet, brought the two settlements under one municipal administration, yet this church kept its role and its patron. A newer church dedicated to Notre-Dame-de-Liesse was established in Montan in 1992.