Vercelli

Vercelli lies on the Sesia in the Piedmont rice plain, a city that had been the seat of bishops since Saint Eusebius in the fourth century. Its great Gothic abbey of Sant'Andrea, built between 1219 and 1227, is one of the first examples of north-European Gothic in Italy. Long wars between Guelph and Ghibelline families ended in 1335, when Vercelli lost its political independence for good.

After a time of relative calm under the Visconti, in 1427 the city passed to the Duchy of Savoy and quickly grew rich, becoming one of the main cultural centres of Renaissance Piedmont, where Gaudenzio Ferrari painted the frescoes of San Cristoforo, built in 1515. Late in the sixteenth century Charles Emmanuel I decided to make Vercelli a fortress city, and for more than a century the walls held it in. In 1704, in the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duke of Vendôme took Vercelli in its last siege and destroyed its walls and citadel; the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 returned it to Savoy.