Chiesa dei Santi Gordiano ed Epimaco

Blevio's oldest documented church stands on the lakefront in the hamlet of Girola. Recorded since the late thirteenth century and rebuilt in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, it served the village as parish church until 1967 and still preserves frescoes, stuccoes and a noted organ.

Why it matters

This is the church that anchored Christian life in Blevio for centuries. A place of worship here is documented from the late 1200s, when the parish appears among the dependencies of the cathedral chapter of Como, and the present building took shape between the sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century. Losing parish status in 1967 did not dim its interest: the church remains the most atmospheric historic building on Blevio's lakefront, and its state of catalog protection is tracked by the Lombardy regional heritage system. It preserves a quiet historic interior within a village square that still feels lived-in rather than staged.

What to notice

The facade is a disciplined eighteenth-century composition, articulated by four horizontal rows of pilaster strips and closed by a triangular fronton crowned with a metal cross with crown and floral motifs. An inscribed plaque beside the portal lists local benefactors, including Sofia Vonwiller Mylius, wife of an early owner of nearby Villa Cademartori, evidence of how the lake's villa society supported village religious life.

The single nave ends in a presbytery with two side wings. A baptistery stands beside a canvas of Christ appearing to a saint; opposite, a painting of Saint Sebastian faces a niche with a statue of Saint Joseph with the Child. The first bay carries an elliptical vault with the Holy Spirit at its centre and the four original Doctors of the Church in the pendentives; the nave vault has an octagonal motif around a stuccoed IHS monogram. The right-hand chapel, with a light marble altar, is dedicated to the Madonna del Rosario. Through the triumphal arch — inscribed "ADEAMUS CUM FIDUCIA AD THRONUM GRATIAE" — the main marble altar holds statues of the two martyrs Gordian and Epimachus beneath a painting of the Madonna presenting the young Jesus. On the counter-facade sits the 1821 organ built by the Prestinari firm of Magenta, which according to the standard account incorporates some sixteenth-century pipes and was declared an Italian national monument in 1983.

Context and history

The documentary trail is unusually deep for a village of this size. Archival research on Lombard ecclesiastical institutions records the Blevio church among the possessions of the cathedral chapter of Como from the end of the thirteenth century. At the pastoral visit of Bishop Ninguarda at the close of the sixteenth century it appears as "Sanctorum Giordani et Epimaci Martyrum", serving about 400 parishioners, and it is confirmed as a parish in the pieve of Zezio in 1651. Eighteenth-century reports track the parish's modest income and growing flock — 475 souls in 1781, about 500 in 1788. The regional catalogue dates the surviving fabric to the sixteenth century with mid-eighteenth-century completion, which matches the church's present appearance: a late-Baroque vessel on medieval foundations of memory. Confraternities of the Santissimo Sacrament — the women's one erected by episcopal decree on 3 May 1879 — once animated its liturgical life. The opening of San Francesco d'Assisi in 1967 made this church subordinate within Blevio's parish; it remains part of the village's religious heritage.