Ancient Santhià (Vercelli)

The Collegiata di Sant'Agata boasts a long history of 1400 years of devotion to this Saint of Sicilian origins, and was built on the remains of an ancient Romanesque temple. Of it, only the crypt and the bell tower remain. Before the Collegiate Church, on the same site there was a parish church (10th century), always dedicated to the Saint of Catania. The toponym "Santhià", in fact, comes from the crasis of the words "Sancta" and "Agatha": in 990, returning from Rome along the Via Francigena, which takes its name from it, the Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury stopped at Santhià , marking it in his diary as "Sca Agath". Probably, even then the place was home to the relics of the Catanese saint, which would motivate the devotion to Sant'Agata and the election of Santhià to mansio. The collegiate canonical, thanks to the interest of the diocese of Vercelli for the village, was already active in the eleventh century. The current appearance of the church is due to the nineteenth-century reconstruction by the architect Giuseppe Talucchi, who studied a neoclassical style project with a large pronaos, and a basilica plan with three naves divided by two rows of mighty columns. The central vault is embellished by the work of Paolo Emilio Morgari, the "Gloria di Sant'Agata", while on the walls there are frescoes by C. Costa and L. Hartman. In the left aisle, inside the third chapel, there is a precious polyptych in ten tables by the artist Gerolamo Giovenone.