Chiesa di San Martino

Under Monte Borbino, the small church of San Martino has a Romanesque nave with exposed wooden trusses and a fifteenth-century rib-vaulted apse; its history includes theft, neglect and restoration.

Why it matters

San Martino is a medieval church in Abbadia Lariana, documented from the thirteenth century. It stands at the foot of Monte Borbino near the Borbino washhouse. The building retains its unplastered structure without Baroque altars; many frescoes were stolen over the decades, leaving a record of rural worship before wealth reached the hills.

What to notice

• The rectangular, single-naved plan with a wooden roof on exposed trusses, the form the church took when it was renovated in the fifteenth century.
• The ogival arch leading to the apse, covered by a rib-vaulted cross vault closed at its centre by a circular keystone with toric moulding — the most refined piece of masonry in the building.
• The empty places where images used to be: the portal records that frescoes honouring San Martino and the Madonna were carried off over time, and only photographic evidence of them survives.
• The documented Crucifixion on the back wall, recorded in a document of 1593 and today almost completely faded, which local press histories describe with figures of saints around the cross.
• The church's setting on a terrace above the lake, near the restored public washhouse of Borbino.

Context and history

San Martino grew as one of the rural chapels serving the mountain hamlets before the lakeside parish absorbed them. The regional heritage catalogue dates its construction between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, matching the tourism portal's evidence of documentation in the 1200s and renovation in the 1400s. Local press history adds the building's later misadventures: deconsecrated in 1941, it was sold two years later to a private owner who never maintained it, and the roofless church became prey to vandals and thieves — the altar fresco is presumed stolen around 1964. In 1973 the Milan Superintendency refused a demolition request from the municipality and imposed restoration instead, the decision that saved the building. The church has been included in the provincial museum system.