The buildings were built, a short distance away, on the hill above the hamlet of Vanzone, Colle Santa Maria, 522 m high; reached by a path flanked by numerous chapels of the Via Crucis dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries.
-ORATORY or SANCTUARY OF SANTA MARIA
Built between 1400 and 1477, the church stands near the remains of the castle of the Counts of Biandrate, destroyed in the 13th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the oratory-sanctuary of Santa Maria was the residence of hermits who guaranteed its conservation.
-CHAPEL
It is a small chapel, near the oratory-sanctuary, which resembles the buildings of the seventeenth century, but certainly earlier because it preserves a fresco of the fifteenth century.
Vanzone was throughout the 13th century an important feudal center dominated by the Counts of Biandrate, then from the 15th century by the Barbavara family. Franca Tonella Regis (1997: 112) makes the undocumented hypothesis that the building corresponds to the remains of the ancient castle chapel that stood on the site. Another possibility is that the oratory of Santa Maria was originally the chapel of the castle and that this building was the original chapel of Santa Maria. The respective orientation of the two buildings (east for this chapel and west for the church) could strengthen this new hypothesis.