Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Abate

The parish church of Sasso was rebuilt in the late eighteenth century in clean neoclassical lines, yet it keeps artworks inherited from its predecessor, including an early seventeenth-century Last Supper.

Why it matters

Sasso lies on the slopes above Gargnano’s shore. Its parish church reflects the development of the mountain hamlets: first recorded in a sixteenth-century episcopal visit, it became autonomous from Gargnano’s mother church in the seventeenth century and was rebuilt from 1771 when the Vicinia judged the earlier building inadequate. Its neoclassical lines contrast with Gargnano’s Romanesque and Gothic churches. It stands within the village of Sasso.

What to notice

The church’s altars include the main altar with the statue of Sant'Antonio Abate, the Rosary altar with a fine statue of the Madonna and Child, and the altar of the Santissimo Sacramento bearing the Last Supper painting from the first years of the seventeenth century. The Last Supper depicts a round table, the Apostles seated in a circle, Saint John resting his head on the wood, a cat on the floor in the foreground, and Judas gripping the bag of coins. Architecturally, the church has a single hall with a double-height barrel vault, simply plastered walls framed by a stucco cornice, and a facade of four pilaster strips under a triangular pediment.

Context and history

A church at Sasso was recorded during Bishop Domenico Bollani’s 1566 pastoral visitation. In 1646 the local vicinie obtained separation from the pieve of San Martino at Gargnano, creating an autonomous parish under local patronage — the same San Martino whose neoclassical rebuilding still dominates the lakefront centre. When the community outgrew the old building, enlargement began in 1771, a date drawn from the parish's own account books; work paused and resumed in 1787, raising choir and presbytery walls and finishing the interior cornice. Three altars from the earlier church were reinstalled in the early 1800s, and in 1826 fra Damiano Damiani completed the organ. The bell tower followed from 1845. Only in 1949, after further twentieth-century structural work, was the church solemnly consecrated. The rebuilt interior thus frames artworks up to two centuries older than its walls.