Carignano

Carignano was formed on the left bank of the Po starting from the Roman era. A Lombard necropolis excavated at the beginning of the twentieth century testifies to the strategic importance of the locality, located at the crossroads of the routes that go from Turin to Saluzzo and from Asti towards the Alpine passes. Surrounded by mighty walls, the city was full of sieges, in particular the one of 1544 was hard on the city. During the sixteenth century the city expanded beyond the curtain wall, where four convents, private palaces and welfare works were built. The city changed appearance with the future of the Baroque style and the birth of industries; in fact, in the nineteenth century, the old convent of Santa Chiara was transformed into a wool mill; whose structures are today the subject of a vast intervention of reshaping. Inside the city there are still today works with a medieval character such as the tower dating back to 1228. Along the streets of the village and especially in the central square there are ancient decorated medieval houses with arcades; it was Alfredo d'Andrade who designed the houses in Carignano, collecting the models for the exhibition of 1884. In Carignano it is possible to admire the fourteenth-century house of Renato di Savoia. The church of the Madonna delle Grazie, was built in 1596 and has a single nave with a two-order facade with a large gratin made in our century by Shivane; inside we find valuable stuccos to decorate the vault of the nave. The church of the misericordia of 1640 was the seat of one of the two brotherhoods of the city, inside it is preserved a prestigious altar and a plastic group of the writer Carlo Plura. The seventeenth-century church of the Spirito Santo features frescoes and fake architectures by the young people of Varese and works by six and eighteenth-century artists. The church of San Giuseppe dating back to 1677 constitutes a perspective scenario on Via Monte di Pietà. Carignano in addition to its beautiful churches offers several glimpses of almost theatrical buildings that intersect between the various streets. A few kilometers from the city between corn and wheat crops stands the chapel of the visitation, the work of Vittone who built it in 1739 for the banker Antonio Faccio. Outside, the undulating wall perimeter expresses Baroque games, and is only a premise to the games of superimposed domes and intertwined arches that open inside the chapel.