Chiesa dei Santi Gusmeo e Matteo

In a park of plane trees above Gravedona's lakefront, the Church of Saints Gusmeo and Matteo commemorates the ground where two soldier martyrs were, by tradition, captured and killed. Rebuilt and turned around in 1533, its presbytery vault carries a signed and dated fresco of 1608 by Giovan Mauro della Rovere.

Why it matters

The dedication reaches back to one of the founding legends of the lake's Christianity. Gusmeo and Matteo are remembered as soldiers of the Theban Legion who escaped Emperor Maximian's massacre of their comrades and fled down the lake's western coast, only to be caught and beheaded here. The parish records the discovery of their bodies on 11 September 1248, and a first church — dedicated at first to Saint Fidelis, another soldier-martyr of the Lario shores — was raised on the spot in the thirteenth century.

The site condenses seven centuries of building history: visible remains of the Romanesque original, a Renaissance reconstruction that reversed the building's axis, seventeenth-century decoration signed by a major Lombard painter, and the relics of the two saints still honoured at the high altar.

What to notice

Evidence of the medieval church survives at the edges. On the southern flank and around the apse end, small windows of terracotta, hanging arches and a dentil cornice belong to the original thirteenth-century building — a Romanesque hall of square plan whose facade once faced east. Terracotta pinnacles crown the former gable wall; they mark the old front, pulled down in 1533 to clear space for the new presbytery when the whole church was reoriented.

Inside, the hall is single-naved with side chapels and a square apse. The presbytery vault bears a fresco of God the Father glorified among musical angels, painted and signed in 1608 by Giovan Mauro della Rovere, called il Fiammenghino. Stucco frames by Giovanni Battista da Moltrasio, documented in 1632–33, enfold it. Along the chapels: a polychrome statue and seventeenth-century canvas in the Rosary chapel with fresco work attributed to Giovanni Battista Pozzi, an Annunciation chapel built in the seventeenth century with scenes from the Virgin's life, and a sculpted statue of Saint Pius V added in the eighteenth century. The high altar in polychrome marbles guards the reliquary with the saints' remains, translated there in 1637 by order of Bishop Carafino.

Context and history

The 1533 reconstruction answered new liturgical needs: by demolishing the medieval facade and turning the church, the builders laid a new presbytery over the ground the tradition holds sacred. A porticoed pronaos was later added to protect the entrance — payments to the builder Giovanni Maria Baroggio are recorded in 1702 and 1703 — and the tower campanile rose between 1616 and 1617, its arches decorating each string course. The sacristy was completed in 1609.

Through all these changes the church kept its martyrs. The 1637 translation of the relics into the new marble altar gave the building its pilgrim purpose, and the side chapels, endowed by local families, filled the walls during the 1600s and 1700s. The church remains part of the parish of Gravedona and is grouped by the diocese with the town's principal art churches.