Who ever says that you cannot turn back time has never been to Biella. Or, more precisely, has not taken the funicular elevator from downtown Biella up to the oldest part of town, 50 metres up and 100 years back.
Our Time Travel in Biella
We travelled to Biella (and near-by Oropa) as a stopover on our journey home from the Aosta Valley. Arriving in the early evening, we had booked an accommodation for two nights so we could use the second day for a walk around town.
We had, quite frankly, not anticipated to find much of interest in Biella and found our expectations by and large confirmed until, late in the afternoon, we stumbled upon this piece of magic: the town’s very own time machine.
Biella is a prosperous town with a history that reaches back into the early Middle Ages. It also has the usual array of buildings that come with such a background, mainly a historic town hall, a Cathedral church and an ancient municipal battisterio, all of them clustered around a central piazza …
… but I think it is fair to say that you will not encounter much in downtown Biella that you would not be able to find in any other city across Northern Italy.
For the last 150 years or so, the town’s life has largely revolved around textile manufacturing: Nino Cerrutti is from here, and the less famous but even more respected Zegna family (Ermenegildo and his two sons) are from the area. (Fila sportswear is another brand that originally comes from Biella.)
The textile industry – benefitting from the town’s long tradition of wool production as well as from the humid local climate – developed in the 19th century, and while the downtown areas thrived, the previously dominant uptown district was quietly forgotten.
The hilltop district of Piazzo was created in the 12th century by the local bishop as a refuge for citizens during the Italian civil war between the parties of the Pope (the Guelphs) and the German Emperor – sorry: the “Holy Roman Emperor” (the Ghibellines).
700 years later, while Biella’s downtown districts near the river Cervo were developed alongside factories and logistic centres to meet the challenges in the dawn of a new age, the uptown Piazzo went into the gentle slumber of a Sleeping Beauty.
A slumber from which it has still not entirely woken up. In the streets around the Piazza della Cisterna, you can discover things that you thought no longer existed, not even in Italy.
Alongside many Italian streets, time appears to have stopped sometime in the 1970s, and you can still find shops full of pots and pans or electric goods that are simply piled up against the wall.
Over here, meanwhile, time seems to have come to a halt several decades before that.
Under the Piazzo’s shady colonnades, too, everything has been preserved in the amber of benign neglect.
The last major event that appears to have left an imprint on the face of the Piazzo occurred in 1780 when King Vittorio Amedeo of Savoy visited the Marian shrine of Oropa and stopped over in Biella for a brief visit.
A new town gate was constructed, and several buildings around the central square received a facelift.
The funicolare elevator was added roughly one hundred years after that and received its own facelift in 1975 when the original 19th century cabins were exchanged for something more state-of-the-art, which themselves look rather quaint today and have an air of melancholy and nostalgia about them.
We recommend to take the service (which is for free) for the way up to enjoy the spectacle of the gradually opening view of town and country in front of your eyes …
… and then to walk down via the Costa San Sebastiano.
And do not forget to take a close look at the historic photos in the funicolare’s departure and arrival areas! Some of these photos must have been taken 100 years ago, but a century appears to be a short time in the history of an ancient Italian town.
