Chiesa dei Santi Pietro e Paolo

Above the lake in the old borgo of Nesso stands the parish church of Saints Peter and Paul, a baroque rebuilding of a church whose documented history reaches back to 1095. Inside, frescoes attributed to Carlo Innocenzo Carloni and later local painters make it a compact survey of Como diocesan art in one village nave.

Why it matters

This is the religious and civic heart of Nesso, and its layered interior records nearly a millennium of the village's story. The earliest documented consecration is 1095; tradition connects it with Pope Urban II and with Bishop Rainaldo, whose remains are said to be kept in the church and whose frequent presence in Nesso reportedly earned the building the rank of duomo in local usage. The present building, however, is a seventeenth-century reconstruction in baroque style, its facade turned away from the lake toward the village — a reversal that still shapes how you approach and read the church today.

The church preserves an important example of sacred art in the Comasco. The San Giuseppe chapel holds frescoes attributed to Carlo Innocenzo Carloni, one of the most sought-after decorative painters of the eighteenth century on the Lario, and the baptistery carries frescoes by Luigi Tagliaferri, a nineteenth-century painter from the Como area. Together with the carved confessionals, the marble altar and the eighteenth-century stuccoes, these works make the church an essential counterpart to Nesso's natural spectacle.

What to notice

The Baroque rebuilding reoriented the church: the medieval church faced the water, the present one faces the borgo, so the visitor arrives as the seventeenth-century planners intended. The nave is flanked by four side chapels, dedicated to the Madonna del Rosario, the Crocifisso, San Giuseppe and San Francesco Saverio; each repays attention, from the paintings of Francesco Maria Bianchi in the Crucifix chapel to the works of the local painter Giovan Battista Caprani in the Rosary chapel.

The San Giuseppe chapel contains frescoes attributed to Carloni. The baptistery's frescoes by Tagliaferri are a later, nineteenth-century layer. Near the bell tower, a small storeroom preserves a fragment of fresco from the pre-Baroque church, a trace of the building consecrated in 1095.

Context and history

The church of Santi Pietro e Paolo is first documented with its 1095 consecration, an event local tradition links to Pope Urban II during the era of reform and to Bishop Rainaldo of Como. The date anchors the church among the oldest recorded parishes on this stretch of shore, and the honorific of "duomo" attached to it reflects the bishop's personal ties to Nesso rather than a formal cathedral seat.

The seventeenth-century rebuilding — the regional catalogue's record dates the construction campaign from 1632 into the eighteenth century — replaced the medieval structure with the present baroque church, reorienting the entrance and organising the interior around side chapels of the kind typical of Como diocesan reconstruction in that period. The parish itself is canonically part of the Diocese of Como and appears in the diocesan directory and in the national ecclesiastical heritage registers; its historical archives are catalogued in the SIUSA archival system. Later decorative campaigns, including Tagliaferri's baptistery work, carried the interior into the nineteenth century.