Chiesa Parrocchiale di San Benedetto

In the middle of Limone's old town, the parish church of San Benedetto is where the village's art and memory concentrate. Its interior includes marble Baroque altars, a sixteenth-century altarpiece, the font where Saint Daniele Comboni was baptised, and a room of local history with material dating from the twelfth century onward.

Why it matters

San Benedetto is the religious and civic heart of Limone sul Garda, the church where the community has worshipped since the seventeenth century and where its most famous son entered the faith. Built in 1691 by Andrea Pernis of Como on the site of an older medieval church, it concentrates the artistic patrimony of the village in one interior: the altar sculptures of a leading Trentino baroque workshop, paintings spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and the baptistry tied to Daniele Comboni, the missionary who became vicar apostolic of Central Africa and a canonised saint. The church is a principal monument of the old town.

What to notice

The exterior is deliberately plain, so the surprise is inside: a single nave with side altars in polychrome marble. The high altar, dated 1724, and the altar of the Crucifix, dated 1721, are the work of Cristoforo Benedetti of Castione, a sculptor whose marble altars also serve Trento cathedral; the altar of the Rosary of 1704 belongs to the same hand, as does the sculptural Annunciation set on the triumphal arch. Around them stand the altar of the Santissimo Sacramento of 1699 by Silvestro Ogna and his brothers of Rezzato, with an anonymous Last Supper above it, and the altar of Sant'Antonio da Padova of 1696, holding a painting of 1847 by Antonio Moro of Limone. Above the high altar hangs the altarpiece of the Deposition painted in 1547 by Battista d'Angelo, known as il Moro, a Veronese painter of the mid-Renaissance. The interior also includes paintings by Andrea Celesti in an early-eighteenth-century manner, the stone baptistery where Daniele Comboni was baptised in 1831, and an organ built by Damiano Damiani in 1831 and restored in 2007–08.

Context and history

Christian life in Limone was organised around the hillside church of San Pietro in Oliveto until the later Middle Ages; a church on the present site is cited in a papal bull of 1186. The parish was formally erected on 18 September 1532 by the bishop of Brescia, Francesco Cornelio, who granted the village a resident priest and its own baptismal font — a stone baptistery that tradition links to the visit of Saint Charles Borromeo in 1580. In its archive the parish still preserves the town's historical registers of baptisms, marriages and deaths, the civic memory of the village in ledger form. Growth of the village justified a larger building, and from 1691 the Como master Andrea Pernis raised the present baroque church, enlarging the medieval structure. The eighteenth century furnished it with the Benedetti altars; the nineteenth added the Damiani organ and new paintings. In 1879 the church received an unusual honour: Daniele Comboni, baptised at its font in 1831, returned as bishop of Central Africa and consecrated the building he had known as a child. The bell tower was restored in 2006–07, and remains a parish church.