Chiesa di Santa Marta

Behind Lecco's elegant main street hides one of the city's oldest churches. Santa Marta, first recorded in the thirteenth century and originally dedicated to San Calimero, served the Disciplini confraternity, keeps a 1615 barrel vault under baroque decoration, and preserves a statue that comforted the city during the 1630 plague.

Why it matters

Lecco's centre advertises the basilica and the Matitone, but Santa Marta is where the city's older, more intimate devotional life survives. It stands a step off the pedestrian flow of the main shopping street, and its history reaches back to the Duecento — earlier than most of the buildings around it. The church is also the cradle of a living popular tradition: the "michini", small unleavened loaves that Lecco still distributes every 29 July for the feast of St Martha, a custom the Disciplini confraternity began here centuries ago. Its Baroque frescoes preserve the city's memory of plague, confraternities and street feasts.

What to notice

The church has a simple façade beneath a light eighteenth-century portico, the "porticato al vento", built between 1720 and 1730. Its single nave has a barrel vault dated 1615, with Baroque stucco, frescoes and gilding. In the presbytery vault, the late-seventeenth-century "Gloria di Santa Marta" is attributed to Giovan Battista and Carlo Pozzo. A seventeenth-century statue of the Madonna, carried in the penitential procession of 1630, is remembered as the "Madonna della Peste"; it is also identified as the Madonna del Rosario with the blessing Child. Sixteenth-century carved panels with busts of the apostles stand at the base of the faux-marble altar made in 1816, apparently to a design associated with Giuseppe Bovara.

Context and history

The church existed by the thirteenth century, founded under the dedication of San Calimero. Before 1386 it became the seat of the Disciplini di Santa Marta, the flagellant confraternity of white-clad penitents who ran charitable works in the borgo, and with the confraternity came the new dedication — and, in time, the michini tradition still attached to the saint's feast on 29 July. The most important structural transformations came at the end of the fifteenth century and the start of the seventeenth, when the 1615 barrel vault was added. The porticoed façade arrived in the 1720s and 1730s, followed by Baroque interior decoration. A restoration in 2012 renewed the building. Through these changes the church remained a confraternal, popular space, its art reflecting processions, plagues and feasts rather than princely commissions.