Varallo is a small town at the point where the Valsesia stops being a wide valley and starts becoming a mountain one, and above it, on a rocky spur reached by a winding road or a short cable car, is the oldest and most ambitious of the Sacri Monti. In 1491 a Franciscan friar called Bernardino Caimi, back from the Holy Land, set out to recreate Jerusalem here for pilgrims who could never make the journey. The result is a hilltop village of more than forty chapels filled with life-size painted terracotta and wooden figures, hundreds of them, telling the life of Christ like a frozen theatre. Gaudenzio Ferrari, the great Renaissance painter of this valley, worked on many of them.
It is a strange, moving and slightly overwhelming place, and the figures are often disarmingly real, with glass eyes and real hair. Together with eight other devotional mountains in Piedmont and Lombardy, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it remains a pilgrimage site today.
Riding the Valsesia is a joy. The road up from Varallo follows the Sesia river toward Alagna, at the foot of Monte Rosa, through a valley of stone villages with Walser wooden houses, and the river below is clear, fast and famous for rafting and kayaking. Side valleys, like the Val Mastallone toward Fobello and the climb over to Lake Orta at the Colle della Colma, offer narrow, twisting roads with little traffic. The main valley road is good but busy on summer Sundays.
Varallo has fuel, a pleasant old centre with arcaded streets, and cafés. The local food is mountain fare: polenta, cheeses like toma, and miacce, thin crêpes cooked on hot irons. Come in late spring or early autumn, when the light is clear and the chestnut woods are fresh or golden, and ride up to the holy mountain in the morning before the coach parties arrive.