HISTORY

The land where Villafranca d’Asti now lies is well known to palaeontologists, and indeed so many fossils have been unearthed here that it has even given the name to an entire era. The ‘villafranchian’ geological period is between the Pliocenic and the Pleistocenic periods, in the quaternary era. Most of the fossils are of plant origin, but in areas where the soil is sandier it is not difficult to find animal skeletons (rhinoceros, bovidae and cervidae). The tusks of a mastodon have even been found, and these are now kept in the Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the University of Turin.
Inhabited since the earliest times, as Roman finds in the hamlet of Taverne show, the valley where Villafranca lies was the site for numerous villages in the Middle Ages, all connected to the main church (‘Pieve’) in Musanza, which was in what is now piazza Santanera. During the second half of the thirteenth century, however, the increasingly powerful Commune of Asti decided to found a new settlement around the church, Villafranca d’Asti, in order to have more control over the road to Turin. The name of the village appears for the first time, in the Latinate version Villafrancha – in a deed dated 25 February 1257.
The area was heavily damaged in the fourteenth century and even more so in the sixteenth century in the wars between the French and the Spanish, which included a bloody battle in September 1554 around the hill of Vulpilio, but has always found the strength to rebuild and move on.
In 1557 Giacomo Goria was born, bishop of Vercelli from 1611 to 1648 and founder of the local Opera Pia Sant’Elena, which still exists. In his honour, between 1646 and 1679 the current parish church, known as the Collegiata di Sant’Elena, was built from a design by the architect Amedeo di Castellamonte.
In the eighteenth century the population increased considerably and in the nineteenth century it grew wealthy thanks above all to the railway line between Turin and Genoa, opened in 1849, which crossed the area, allowing trade and business to flourish.