Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista

The abandoned church of a medieval religious order survives inside Domaso: built over an older chapel of Saint Catherine, passed from Humiliati to Capuchins, stripped of its frescoes in 1968, and now a private house whose facade and tower still face the street.

Why it matters

Almost every town on Lake Como has lost its monastic buildings; Domaso has kept one fragment. This church is what remains of a convent founded, by tradition, in 1160 by Giovanni da Meda and documented from the thirteenth century onward — first for the Humiliati, then for the Capuchins, later a barracks, finally a dwelling. Its interest is precisely that layered survival: a fifteenth-century nave raised over a twelfth-century chapel, a Renaissance stone portal, a bell tower with terracotta ornament, and a documented fresco campaign by a named Como painter, Giovanni Andrea De Magistris, whose Annunciation of 1512 was among the works removed. The building preserves an important part of Domaso’s religious and social history.

What to notice

• The gabled facade, simple and flat, articulated by pilaster strips, with a sandstone portal of Renaissance design whose broken tympanum still holds fragments of a fresco of Saint John the Baptist; above it an ocular window with a painted frame. - The bell tower on the north flank, closing in a cusp, worked in brick: hanging arches, dentil courses, single and twin lights framed in terracotta, the same vocabulary repeated along the string courses on all four sides. - The secondary stone portal with its lunette, opening onto the road along the north side. - On the east wall, patches of painted plaster with geometric motifs, and outside the apse the ghost of a cruciform painted pattern edged with a dentilled brick cornice — traces of a full exterior decoration scheme. - The interior arrangement, visible in form even in its transformed state: a single nave on ogival arcades with a square apse, the structure of a fifteenth-century preaching hall. - The fact of absence itself: bare walls where fresco cycles hung until 1968, a building that documents both devotion and dispersal.

Context and history

The site begins with a chapel of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, probably of the twelfth century, described again in a pastoral visitation of 1593. Around it grew a convent of the Humiliati, an order rooted in twelfth-century Lombardy whose Domaso house tradition places under Giovanni da Meda in 1160 and documents from the 1200s. The present church was built in the fifteenth century — the pointed arcades, square apse, facade and tower all belong to that campaign — and its decoration was completed in the sixteenth with the stone portals and frescoes including De Magistris's Annunciation of 1512. In 1571 Pope Pius V suppressed the Humiliati; the Domaso convent, housing five friars, was abandoned. Capuchins took over in 1573 with funding from the Milanese senator Tommaso Odescalchi, reopened the church in 1588, and commissioned an altarpiece for the Saint Catherine chapel that was later moved to the church of Sant'Antonio. Outgrowing the site, they rebuilt the complex from 1624 around a new church dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua, consecrated in 1646, and this church fell out of use. After the convent's suppression of 1802 the buildings served as a barracks and passed into private hands. In 1968 the owner, Count Lodovico Gallarati Scotti, with Superintendency authorisation, had the remaining frescoes detached before roof leaks destroyed them and transferred to Villa Melzi at Bellagio; that same year the rest of the convent was demolished for a residential block, leaving the church alone. Restored in recent years, it stands deconsecrated and converted to a residence.