Santuario della Madonna di Paullo

High on the hillside above the hamlet of Croce, the small sanctuary of the Madonna di Paullo was raised after the Second World War by returning soldiers in gratitude for their survival. Inside waits a 17th-century wooden Our Lady of Sorrows, set beneath stained glass designed by the sanctuary's own donor.

Why it matters

Many lake sanctuaries commemorate old miracles; this one remembers a modern catastrophe. The church, formally the chiesetta of the Madonna delle Grazie at Paullo, was built on the remains of an ancient chapel by a group of veterans of the Second World War as an act of thanksgiving — an ex-voto on the scale of a building. Its hillside position at Paullo above Croce frames views over the western shore.

What to notice

The interior is small. The focal image is the wooden statue of Our Lady of Sorrows, a seventeenth-century sculpture that predates the post-war building. The stained-glass designs are credited to C.R. Montag, the donor, and were executed by the H. Derix workshop of Kevelaer in Germany. Their presence reflects the donor's connections. The church stands in a terraced setting above Croce and faces down the slope toward Lake Como.

Context and history

An earlier chapel occupied the site of the present building. The current chiesetta went up after the Second World War — the parish research record dates it to 1951 — promoted by a group of men who had returned from the war and wished to thank the Madonna for coming home. Their foundation belongs to a widespread Italian pattern of post-war votive building, and the choice of the old chapel's site rejoined that new gratitude to an older tradition of hillside worship above Croce. The seventeenth-century Addolorata statue and later Derix glass bring different periods of devotional art into the post-war sanctuary.