It is more of the Piedmont city because of its undertakings football team in Serie B. Visit for a delayed departure from Malpensa, 2008. There are cities - worldwide best known and least known - of which the town is dominated by a building, a tower, a tower or a mountain, a peak, a valley. An element, which synthesizes and summarizes, or maybe flatten the rest of the city. Consider, for example, at Chartres Cathedral, visible from any backwater to a radius of several tens of kilometers. Consider, again, the Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro, velvety rock chlorophyll, disturbing and reassuring presence at the same time, omnipresent. Consider, finally, in Varanasi, the spiritual capital of India, swallowed up by the presence of the "mother of all rivers, the Ganges mysterious.
Novara "is" the dome of the Basilica of San Gaudenzio Antonelli. Tall, slender, almost discordant in the relationship between height and width, however bold. Curious history of this place of worship, built from 1577 and designed by Pellegrino Tibaldi (with bell Benedetto Alfieri), would, with its unusual decoration for the time, be somehow the symbol of artistic effervescence the Baroque era. And he became, but not only one style in particular in the era of Napoleon's penetration in the Po Valley, became the refuge, the repository of works of art saved from the destruction of monuments razed to make way for new, so-called new. And continuous additions to the Renaissance basilica of the patron saint ended up making a real museum of the people and the entire city.
Until the nineteenth century erupted in the lives of Novara and integration of the Kingdom of Savoy - and then to that of Italy - urged administrators to redesign the entire city in depth, sometimes with the unfortunate demolition of churches, walls and buildings. But without doubt commendable initiatives not lacking, such as its building of the dome of the Basilica of San Gaudenzio, headed by the great architect Alessandro Antonelli. Who spent the last 44 years of his life, from 1844 to 1888, working on the project and its implementation, in parallel to the building of the Mole Antonelliana. Overlap, in fact, obvious structural problems in financial shortages, el'avversità of much of the population. But the long gestation allowed the Novara to get used to the daring structure, even reaching to affezionarvisi. So today Novara "is" the dome Antonelli, no ifs, ands or buts.
Walk the streets of the old town on a Saturday cold but sunny. Novara is a big village, more than a small city. The people know each other, greet each other, gossip wander around the pedestrian streets, the windows peeping while the children skate in an ice rink and the old marquee party conversation on the benches of the government crisis and battered around the old castle. In the courtyard of Broletto - X and XI centuries - a fine example of medieval civic architecture, and rouged young mothers walking their technological frugoletti man treating them like princes. A city gratified, "bourgeois" that more can not be rich or even wealthy. Antonelli and reassured by the soaring dome, that rises every time turns a corner, as if to say to Novara that the world changes and renews itself, of course, but with caution and slowly, very slowly. Climbed the steps to the dome - like all bold - view of the placid, sleepy town seems to say that the world does not change, is always equal to itself.
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