Immagini di devozione popolare nel territorio di Ayas

The reading of the images of popular devotion, painted on the houses in the territory of Ayas, reveals a set of intense relationships that in past centuries the inhabitants of the upper Evançon Valley had with Nature, with the Saints, with the Church, with the men from the nearby valleys and the plain. Reading these images, climbing along the paths or wandering among the rascards of Ayas, makes you participate in an environment populated by reassuring presences, Madonnas and patron saints of external space, a time full of isolation and fears. The research starts from the silent encounter with these naive wall paintings, with these minor signs of the Sacred, to explain their presence, to interpret their iconographic aspects. The presence in Ayas of a strong clergy and the desire to guard the territory from the influences of the Reformation, which spread to nearby Valais, explain the widespread presence in the villages of numerous images of Christ, the Virgin and other Saints powerful against Evil and Nature. The wall images are also the manifestation of a sensitivity and a culture that has much more distant origins, in the relationships with the Abbots of S. Maurizio d'Aguano, in the influential presence of the Challant, in contact with the world of Oropa through the ancient trade and transhumance exchanges with the Biella area.