Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Abate

Crebbio climbs the hill beside Abbadia Lariana as a preserved medieval borgo, its defensive past still legible in a surviving tower house. At its centre stands the parish church of Sant'Antonio Abate, whose seventeenth-century interior preserves a painting that doubles as a map of the old parish territory.

Why it matters

The parish history is unusually deep: in 1495 Crebbio, whose church was then dedicated to Santa Maria and Sant'Antonio, detached itself from Mandello for the new parish of San Lorenzo sopra Adda; the parish of Sant'Antonio was constituted in 1621. The borgo is the other reason to come: the medieval settlement retains part of its defensive system, including a casatorre, or tower house.

What to notice

• The casatorre of the borgo, surviving evidence of Crebbio's defensive role on the hillside. - The vaulted nave and side chapels raised under don Rocco Alippi, parish priest from 1625 to 1664. - The mid-seventeenth-century oil on canvas, about 150 by 130 centimetres: the parish territory with the church of San Giorgio in red facade — matching Bishop Volpi's 1582 pastoral visit — Sant'Antonio isolated at the centre, the Magi descending the Zucco della Rocca. - The saint's attributes in the same painting: fire and the curved staff with a small bell.

Context and history

The seventeenth-century renovations were not gentle: the parish records that older paintings were destroyed, among them the "very beautiful pictures" noted on the presbytery vault in a document of 1593. The great canvas survived because it was new, and its detail is a document in itself — the absent rectory dates it before 1672, when the casa parrocchiale rose with Armellina De Conti's bequest. The parish calls it artistically modest but historically precious.