Basilica di San Vittore

On Piazza San Vittore in Varese's oldest quarter stands the city's principal church. The Basilica of San Vittore, with its soaring Bernascone bell tower and medieval baptistery beside it, anchors the sacred heart of the borgo, and its chapels gather masterpieces of seventeenth-century Lombard painting.

Why it matters

San Vittore is the principal church of Varese — the parish church around which the medieval borgo grew — and its architecture reads as a compressed history of Lombard taste. A medieval predecessor was rebuilt over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, given a baroque lantern-topped dome and finally a neoclassical facade at the end of the eighteenth. Inside, side chapels hold canvases by the leading exponents of Seicento Lombardy: il Cerano, Francesco Cairo, il Morazzone and Carlo Francesco Nuvolone. San Vittore is a major example of sacred art and architecture in the city centre.

What to notice

The façade presents a sober neoclassical front with salients, designed by Leopoldo Pollack and built between 1788 and 1791, its portal a round arch on Ionic columns set into a rigorously rhythmic frame. The three-aisled hall has three frescoes on the vault of the central nave are the work of Giovanni Battista Zari, who also painted the four Major Prophets on the pendentives and the Apostles and Evangelists on the cupola.

The Maddalena chapel contains where Morazzone's "Magdalene Carried to Heaven by Angels" hangs; its predella shows Christ as a gardener, the curious Gospel episode of the resurrected Jesus mistaken for a hortolan. Another chapel holds a painting of San Vittore by the Varese painter Salvatore Bianchi. Outside, turn to the bell tower, known affectionately as the Bernascone: begun in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century to a design by Giuseppe Bernasconi, completed by the Baroffio brothers in 1774, and raised in grey granite of the Ossola valleys and local brick, its masonry still bears scars from Austrian cannon fire during the battle of Biumo in 1859.

Context and history

The basilica stands on the site of an earlier, probably Romanesque church. Building campaigns unfolded in three main phases: the deep presbytery was realised in the first half of the sixteenth century; the three-naved hall that replaced the older church rose on Pellegrino Pellegrini's design, crowned by the splendid tiburio built between 1589 and 1625 to a design associated with Giuseppe Bernasconi; and the neoclassical facade followed between 1788 and 1791 on Pollack's design. The regional heritage catalogue records the church's structural authors as Pellegrino Pellegrini for the design, Bernasconi for the enlargement and Pollack for the facade.

The high altar is a notable example of Lombard rococo work: designed by the Milanese architect Bartolomeo Bolla and carved between 1734 and 1742 by the sculptors Buzzi of Viggiù, with statues by Elia Vincenzo Buzzi on drawings by Pierantonio Magatti. The presbytery received its present arrangement in 1991, when the altar, ambo, chair and processional cross — offered in memory of Pope Paul VI and designed by Floriano Bodini — completed the reordering required by the Second Vatican Council. Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Montini, had close ties to Varese's Sacro Monte, and the Bodini furnishings give the church a distinctly twentieth-century coda.