Don’t be misled by the word farmhouse. Cascina dell’Arte was originally the agricultural outbuilding of the Abbey and Castle of San Genuario, built in the late 16th century. Its façade still bears a fresco—an exceptional and rare example of late-Renaissance Piedmontese art.

Step inside, and you enter a place shaped by centuries of life. A 17th-century kitchen still stands, complete with its fireplace and cooking pots. Signs of 19th-century rural life linger alongside an early 20th-century hall, where Art Nouveau-style ceilings rise above a floor of Lombard terracotta, framed by original 18th-century doors.

All around, in the village of San Genuario, you can feel the weight of a thousand years of history: From Roman artifacts now housed in the Leone Museum in Vercelli, to the founding of Piedmont’s oldest abbey in 707 by the Lombard soldier Gauderis, who laid down his arms to become its first abbot. From fierce disputes with the newly formed free borough of Crescentino and the Cistercian abbey of Lucedio during the 13th-century Guelph and Ghibelline conflicts, to the construction of the castle in 1422 by the Tizzoni counts.

From the legendary uprising led by the Bella Bergidda—whose conspirators were hanged from the castle battlements—to the transfer of the fief to the House of Savoy in 1592. And from the sweeping changes of the 18th century to the transformation brought by “modern” agriculture from the Restoration era into the 20th century. Cascina Dell’Arte is more than a building: it is the layered memory of these events, these lives, and these lands.