Cappella dei Santi Barbara e Giacomo

In the hamlet of Torille above Verrès stands the chapel of Saints Barbara and James: founded in 1647 by Giacomo Peaquin, swept away by a flood, and rebuilt in the late nineteenth century on a safer site. Its December feast of Santa Barbara still anchors the hamlet's calendar.

Why it matters

The chapel is the religious landmark of Torille, one of the hamlets scattered across the hillsides of the Verrès municipality, and a document of how mountain communities provisioned their own worship before larger parishes reached them. Its dedication pairs Saint Barbara, patroness invoked against sudden death, with Saint James, the pilgrim saint whose Via Francigena route passes through Verrès below. The building also carries the memory of natural hazard: the original 1647 chapel did not simply age out, it was destroyed by a flood, and the decision to rebuild on a different, more secure site is the kind of quiet adaptation that shaped every hamlet in the valley. Its founder, Giacomo Peaquin, is known to history only through this act of foundation, which makes the chapel a rare trace of an ordinary local family's piety.

What to notice

The present building dates from the second half of the nineteenth century and stands on a different, safer site than Peaquin's original chapel. The interior preserves sacred furnishings, and the feast of Santa Barbara on 4 December remains part of the hamlet's religious calendar. The chapel belongs to a network of rural chapels in the municipality of Verrès.

Context and history

Giacomo Peaquin founded the chapel at Torille in 1647. A flood destroyed the original building; the present structure was built in the second half of the nineteenth century on a safer site. The chapel is dedicated to Saints Barbara and James, and its furnishings include sacred objects. Santa Barbara's feast on 4 December remains part of the hamlet's religious calendar. Torille itself is an old locality of the Verrès territory, a name that local historiography connects with the medieval casaforte Turrilia and, more distantly, with the seventeenth-century historian Jean-Baptiste de Tillier; the chapel is the hamlet's principal standing monument today.