Chiesa Parrocchiale di San Lorenzo

A few steps from the water of Lake Como, the parish church of San Lorenzo gathers a thousand years of Abbadia Lariana into one building: Benedictine abbey ground, a Servite church of the thirteenth century, and a bright 1915 fresco cycle by Luigi Tagliaferri above a baroque wooden altar.

Why it matters

This is the church that gives the town its identity — the parish of San Lorenzo around which the other churches of the municipality are arranged — and it stands on the most loaded ground in Abbadia Lariana. The place name itself derives from the old abbey: the medieval monastery of San Pietro, whose cloister still survives beside the church, put the "badia" into Abbadia. When the Servite order rebuilt the site in the thirteenth century they created the nucleus of the present building, and when the last friars left in 1788 the church passed to the parish and took the San Lorenzo dedication it keeps today. The church brings monastic history, Baroque architecture and twentieth-century painting together.

What to notice

• The frescoed vault by Luigi Tagliaferri (1841–1927), painted in 1915: the martyrdom of San Lorenzo at the centre, with angels carrying the saint towards heaven, and the twelve apostles distributed over the vault's pillars. - The apsidal basin, where Tagliaferri painted the glory of the Lamb described in the Book of Revelation, with saints on one side and converted peoples on the other; above the organ, four putti hold the inscription "Laudate Deo in cordis et organo". - The high altar, a carved and gilded wooden monument of the seventeenth century whose ciborium rises over three metres and carries an image of the Pietà; two canvases by a Buzzoni painter flank it with scenes from the life of San Lorenzo. - Near the entrance, two large seventeenth-century canvases devoted to Saint Augustine's cult. - The cloister of the ancient Benedictine abbey in the buildings beside the church, and the remains of the earlier parish church of San Lorenzo near the Chiesa Rotta park — the "broken church" that was abandoned when this one took over.

Context and history

The parish chronicle recorded by Don Grisoni credits Filippo Benizi, general of the Servite order founded in Florence in 1233, with having the old Benedictine monastery rebuilt as a Servite priory with a church dedicated to the martyrs Vincent and Anastasius. That first church was small and single-naved, with a rectangular presbytery and a roof of chestnut beams. During the eighteenth century the building was re-dedicated to San Lorenzo, and when the Servites moved to Como in 1788 they sold their convent and ceded the church to the parish, precisely because it was larger and in better condition than the old San Lorenzo then standing where the Chiesa Rotta park is now. In 1888 the engineer Giovanni Maria Stoppani directed the enlargement that created the present three-naved interior, raising the ceiling and adding the side aisles. The Lombardy regional heritage catalogue records both the 1888 architectural intervention and Tagliaferri's nave decoration as the defining layers of the building.