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Vercelli

Provincial capital on the Sesia, Italy's rice capital, seat of Piedmont's oldest diocese, of the Vercelli Book and of the basilica of Sant'Andrea.

Image from the Fondazione Museo del Tesoro del Duomo di Vercelli publication
From Fondazione Museo del Tesoro del Duomo di Vercelli

Vercelli is a city in eastern Piedmont, capital of the homonymous province, standing at 130 metres above sea level on the right bank of the Sesia. It is the main centre of the lower Po plain in Piedmont and is described as Italy's rice capital: the crop dominates the local economy together with public administration, supported by a network of artificial irrigation drawing on the Po and the Sesia.[1] The municipality covers 79.7 square kilometres and in 2020 had 46,362 inhabitants; since the 1980s the population has been declining, after the crisis of the textile industry.[1] The historic centre preserves its medieval pentagon-shaped layout, surrounded by concentric rings of later expansion.[1]

From the Libui to Eusebius

The ancient Vercellae was born as an oppidum of the Libui and in the second half of the 2nd century BC became a Roman base for operations against the Salassi of the Aosta Valley; later it was a major road junction.[1][2] In 101 BC, not far from the city, at the Raudine Plain, Marius defeated the Cimbri.[2]

Around 340 Eusebius became the city's first bishop, and the diocese of Vercelli is remembered as the oldest in Piedmont.[2][3] The late Empire, however, left it impoverished: the 1937 Enciclopedia Italiana recalls that in Saint Jerome's time Vercelli was "raro... habitatore semiruta," that is, almost deserted and half in ruins.[2] On the site of the 4th-5th-century early Christian basilica of Sant'Eusebio stands today's cathedral, rebuilt from 1572 to a design by Pellegrino Tibaldi.[1]

The book nobody could read

The Chapter Library and Archive holds codices and documents dating from the 4th century.[3] The most famous item is the Vercelli Book, a parchment manuscript written in Old English in a scriptorium of south-eastern England towards the end of the 10th century. It contains 23 prose homilies, eleven of which are found in no other surviving copy, and six poems; in two of them, The Fates of the Apostles and Elene, eight runic characters spell out the name of the poet Cynewulf.[4]

For centuries cataloguers registered it as a work in an unknown language. In 1822 the German jurist Friedrich Blume, who had come to Vercelli to study medieval legal manuscripts, leafed through it and recognised the language.[4] How the codex reached Piedmont is not certain: the Museum of the Treasury of the Cathedral, which holds it, states: "The donation of a traveller of high rank, such as a Bishop or a Cardinal coming from the north, is one of the possible theories," along the Via Francigena; another hypothesis links it to Bishop Ulf of Dorchester, present at the Council of Vercelli in 1050.[4]

The commune and Cardinal Guala

After the Lombards, who set up a duchy there with its own mint, and the Carolingians, who made it a county, Vercelli had powerful bishops such as Lutvardo and Attone, and around the year 1000 clashed with Arduin of Ivrea.[1][2] In the 11th century it was already governing itself through its own consuls, joined the Lombard League against Barbarossa and lived through the struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines; the commune's independence ended in 1335 with the lordship of Azzone Visconti.[1][2]

The most influential figure from Vercelli in those centuries was Cardinal Guala Bicchieri. A canon of Sant'Eusebio from 1187 and a cardinal from 1205, in 1216 he was papal legate in England: on 28 October, at Gloucester, he presided over the coronation of the young Henry III and, because of the king's minority, affixed his own seal to the new issue of Magna Carta alongside that of William Marshal.[5] In 1215 he had founded in Vercelli the Victorine canonry of Sant'Andrea, to which he left his possessions and a rich library; he died on 30 May 1227.[5]

The basilica of Sant'Andrea, with its attached cloister and abbey, is the city's emblematic monument. The Enciclopedia Italiana describes it as built "in a single campaign between 1219 and 1227";[2] the more recent Treccani entry dates its construction to 1219-1224, the work of Lombard masons with French influences.[1] The medieval city also retains the Romanesque churches of San Bernardo and San Giuliano, the Gothic churches of San Francesco, San Paolo and San Marco, the portico of the old hospital and several towers.[1]

Under the House of Savoy

In 1427 Filippo Maria Visconti ceded Vercelli to Duke Amedeo VIII of Savoy, and from then on the city's history was bound to that of the House of Savoy and, later, of Turin as capital.[1][2] In the duchy's most difficult period, when much of Piedmont was occupied by the French, Vercelli withstood the attempts of 1553 and 1556 and was the preferred residence of Duke Carlo II, who died there in 1553.[2] The city then endured Spanish rule from 1638 to 1659 and in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, fell into French hands.[1] After the Napoleonic interlude it returned definitively to the House of Savoy in 1814, within the Kingdom of Sardinia.[2]

The city of rice

Already in the 1930s rice-growing was the leading production: the Enciclopedia Italiana recorded 160,000-170,000 quintals of rice a year and 39,546 inhabitants in the municipality in 1931.[2] The province, established in 1927, then also included the Biella area, which split off in 1992 to become the province of Biella; today it counts 82 municipalities and 169,390 inhabitants (2020), stretching between the Valsesia mountains and the rice-monoculture plain.[1]

Rice is also the occasion for the city's main festival: Risò, an international festival organised by the Province and City of Vercelli together with the Ente Nazionale Risi, which in 2025 drew more than 70,000 visitors; the 2026 edition, held from 11 to 13 September, devoted exhibitions to the eightieth anniversary of Arborio rice and the hundred-and-sixtieth of the Cavour Canal.[6] The irrigated plain is however exposed to flooding from the Sesia: in the flood of 2-3 October 2020 the provinces of Vercelli and Cuneo were among the hardest hit, the river burst its banks between Vercelli and Novara and regional rail traffic between the two cities, on the Turin-Milan line, came to a halt.[7]

Football, university, museums

In early Italian football Vercelli was a capital: Pro Vercelli won the championship in 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912, 1913 and 1921, and in 1922 also won the title of the Italian Football Confederation, in years when the game's centre of gravity lay in the plain between Vercelli, Novara and Casale Monferrato.[8]

The city hosts the rectorate, on via Duomo, of the University of Eastern Piedmont, named after Amedeo Avogadro and split between Alessandria, Novara and Vercelli.[9] Among the civic museums, the Museo Borgogna, with its picture gallery, and the Museo Leone stand out.[1] In 2026 the Arca exhibition spaces prepared a major Marc Chagall exhibition with sixty original works, which three weeks after opening already had 6,000 bookings. Mayor Roberto Scheda linked the event to the city's best-known monument's upcoming anniversary:

"We have the basilica of Sant'Andrea which, in 2027, will mark 800 years since the completion of its construction."

Roberto Scheda, mayor of Vercelli, September 2026

The statement was released by the municipality on 22 September 2026.[10]

Pages linking here

Related articles: Novara, Pro Vercelli

Sources

  1. Treccani
  2. Treccani – Enciclopedia Italiana —
  3. Fondazione Museo del Tesoro del Duomo di Vercelli
  4. Fondazione Museo del Tesoro del Duomo di Vercelli
  5. Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
  6. Risò – Festival Internazionale del Riso
  7. Il Post — 4 October 2020
  8. RSSSF
  9. Università del Piemonte Orientale
  10. Comune di Vercelli — 22 September 2026

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