The Broletto is a complex of buildings around a square courtyard, from different periods and in different styles. It was first mentioned in a document in 1208.
Once used as the Town Hall, the Broletto now houses the Civic Museum and the Lapidary Museum.
The collection of the Civic Museum dates from 1874. Started by the “Società Archeologica pel Museo Patrio”, it has been run by Novara City Council since 1890. It comprises an Archaeological section with a rich collection of objects and finds from various historical periods. Among these are flint daggers and arrowheads from the Copper Age, Neolithic polished stone axes, Bronze Age daggers and pins, 13th-14th century funeral urns, vases, bits for horses and twisted blades from the Celtic period. Other sections are devoted to the Middle Ages, the Visconti and Sforza families, and the art and culture of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Highlights of the museum are the perfume containers, coloured glass bottles and fine pottery from the Romanesque period, the grave goods of Lombard warriors, and a sculpture of Christ Blessing by a 13th century sculptor from the Po Plain.
The Lapidary Museum displays Christian and pagan epigraphic monuments, mainly altars and memorial stones dedicated to divinities such as Jupiter, Hercules, Matronae (matrons or mothers), Mercury, and Victory, found in the Roman rural sanctuary of Suno.
The dedications are all datable to the middle of the 2nd century B.C., and were almost all engraved on a classic support formed of a base, a dado with the inscription, and top moulding. The material used was almost invariably serizzo, an economical type of granite abundant in the area, which has the disadvantage that it flakes easily, so that it is often difficult now to read the inscriptions.
The number of engraved finds and the variety of the cults they show make the rural sanctuary of Suno one of the most significant sacred complexes hitherto known in the north-western Italy of Roman times.