La chiesa di Sant'Eusebio a Vercelli tra tarda antichità e Medioevo: osservazioni su vecchie e nuove ipotesi ricostruttive

[Machine translation] The church of Sant'Eusebio in Vercelli, a funerary and martyrary center in the early Christian era and the city's cathedral since the tenth century, represents an important church center in northwestern Italy. Linked to the memory of the protobishop Eusebio, who was buried here, it became the seat of one of the main dioceses in the area, a powerful episcopate and an influential canonical chapter. The old building underwent a total renovation between the 16th and 19th centuries, with the exception of the bell tower, which is still preserved for most of its development, in relation to the first phase of construction, in the 12th century. The essay focuses on the layout of the church before the modern reconstructions, the subject of recent rereadings. Through the examination of written and graphic sources (historical cartography) and existing material data, an attempt is made to recompose the long and complex architectural history of the building. The result is a picture that is at times different from what has been detected so far in literature, on the one hand due to the downsizing of real knowledge about the early Christian period, and on the other for the highlighting of a group of interventions that can be traced back to the central centuries of the Middle Ages, perhaps at times underestimated by critics.