Mombello Monferrato: sights, history and trails

The coat of arms and gonfalone of the municipality of Mombello Monferrato were granted by decree of the President of the Republic of 27 June 1983.^[4]

The gonfalone is a red drape.

The church of San Gottardo di Pozzengo was commissioned by the monferrin religious devotion, in the middle of the Counter-Reformation, on the road that connects the fraction of Gaminella with that of Pozzengo. Its origin is entrusted to the popular traditions still well rooted in the area, such as the miraculous appearance of the holy bishop of Hildesheim to save a child from the fury of a pair of imbizzarrite oxen or that of the wanderer who had leaned on the wall of the porch where the figure of the Saint was imprinted, around which the first newsstand was built.
The oratory appears for the first time as a document in the request sent on 21 March 1692 by Prior Lodovico Mombellardo to the bishop of Casale Monferrato to transform the chapel of San Gottardo into a church country, suitable for the celebration of Holy Mass.

In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, the oratory was expanded with the addition of a Roman tetrastil pronao surmounted by a timpane, while further intervention was carried out in the 1930s-31.
It demolished the ancient apse of the chapel, the dome with lantern was raised on the presbytery and built the two semicilindric lateral transepts that gave the construction a Latin cross planimetry.
The last intervention on the sanctuary of Pozzengo in order of time was carried out in 1996, with the replacement of the glass and the cover mantle in coppi with shaped copper plates.

Inside the church, the great statue of San Gottardo, which took the place of a seventeenth-century painting, dominates the presbytery, while the numerous votive images fixed to the walls represent the sign of popular gratitude for the graces granted.^[6]

In one hundred years, since 1921, the population has been reduced by two-thirds, reaching today less than a thousand inhabitants.

Inhabitants registered^[7]

The square of the church of Mombello is mentioned in the book The devil in the hills by Cesare Pavese.