NOVARA, twenty minutes further down the train line towards Milan, makes for a more elegant, unhurried stopover than Vercelli, its main street, Corso Cavour, neatly paved with half-moon cobbles and lined with pasticcerie and old-fashioned tearooms. That said, there’s not much left of historic Novara: the medieval Broletto houses an open-air cinema in summer, and the Duomo is an overblown Neoclassical creation which dwarfs all around to Lilliputian proportions; inside are bits and pieces from earlier churches – a fifth-century Baptistry with tenth-century frescoes of the Apocalypse, and a frescoed twelfth-century chapel – both open only in the morning. A couple of blocks north, the weird three-tiered dome of the church of San Gaudenzio with its syringe-like spire dominates the whole town. It was built by Antonelli, a nineteenth-century architect responsible for a similar monstrosity, the Mole in Turin.