The Prevostura was probably born around 1040, when a group of priests gathered around the figure of Gerardo Caprasio decided to undertake a community life in the place formerly occupied, according to tradition, by a Benedictine monastery dependent on Novalesa, destroyed during the Saracen raids of the 10th century. The official recognition of the institution took place in 1065, between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries it was one of the main protagonists of religious and economic-political life in the lands of the Dauphiné and the Susa Valley.
During the sixteenth century it suffered heavily from the consequences of the religious wars between Catholics and Reformed to the point that the entire complex with the churches of San Pietro and San Lorenzo was destroyed. A real renaissance occurred during the seventeenth century, under the rule of the provosts of the de Birague family who promoted the reconstruction of ecclesiastical buildings and the hospital and the resumption of religious life in the parishes. As evidence of the activity carried out especially during the long government of René de Birague (1658-1681), the inscription remains on the portal of the Palazzo del Prevosto, which reads Sub Renato renata (reborn under Renato). The Treaty of Utrecht, of 1713, marked the passage of the upper Susa Valley to the Savoy dominion, with a consequent progressive weakening of the Prevostura, considered too tied to the French crown.
The buildings of the ancient canonical body, definitively suppressed in the Napoleonic era, were sold by auction in 1809. Only in 1886 did the construction of the current church of the Sacred Heart consecrated in 1904 take place, which is spread over three naves and preserves the inside the chapel of the Carmine and the sepulchral monument of 1681 of the abbot René de Birague.