Chiesa di San Giorgio

The parish church of Laglio faces the lake from the heart of the village: a 17th-century hall raised between 1619 and 1630 and later dressed with some of the finest stucco work on this shore. Inside are 18th-century stuccoes by Laglio's own Stefano Salterio, and beside it an oratory holding an altarpiece by Carlo Innocenzo Carloni.

Why it matters

San Giorgio is the principal church of Laglio and the building that anchors the village's artistic history. The regional heritage catalogue records its construction between 1619 and 1630 in the square at the centre of the borgo. Two names are central to its artistic history. The first is Stefano Salterio, a sculptor and stuccatore born in Laglio, whose 18th-century stuccoes and ornaments give the interior its refinement. The second is Carlo Innocenzo Carloni, the major late-Baroque painter active across the Lombard lake country, whose Madonna del Rosario hangs in the oratory of the Confratelli del Santissimo Sacramento attached to the church's right side — along with a stucco altar by Stefano Salterio himself.

The archival record runs deep: the parish of San Giorgio appears in the pastoral visits of the Diocese of Como from the 16th century, when Laglio was a parish in the pieve of Nesso, and the church has been the village's spiritual and administrative centre ever since.

What to notice

• The Salterio stuccoes frame the nave and chapels with masks, foliage and figures, the signature material of the Laglio workshop. The portal page calls them "pregiate stucchi" with good reason.
• The Carloni altarpiece: in the oratory of the Santissimo Sacramento to the right of the church, the Madonna del Rosario by Carlo Innocenzo Carloni is the single most important painting in the village, set above a stucco altar by Stefano Salterio — a matched pair of lake-country Baroque specialists.
• 18th-century paintings and sculptures elsewhere in the interior, which the portal records alongside the stuccoes.
• The ensemble of church, campanile and oratory forms a complex in the centre of the village.

Context and history

A church stood here before the present one: local tradition places Christian origins on the site well before the 17th century, and the parish itself is documented from the 1500s in the records of the Diocese of Como, then within the pieve of Nesso. The present building rose between 1619 and about 1630, in the confident decades of Counter-Reformation rebuilding along the lake. Over the 18th century the interior was enriched with the stucco cycle of the Salterio family and with paintings and sculptures of the same century, while the confraternity oratory beside the church received its Carloni altarpiece and stucco altar.

The church ranks as an archpriestal church (chiesa arcipresbiterale), reflecting its historic headship of the local church network that also included the church of San Bartolomeo at Torriggia and the oratory of San Gerolamo in Germanello. Today it is the seat of the Parrocchia di San Giorgio within the Comunità pastorale della Santissima Trinità, grouping Brienno, Carate Urio, Laglio and Moltrasio in the Diocese of Como.