Chiesa di San Giorgio

Recorded from 1252, the church of San Giorgio is among the oldest sacred buildings of Lovere, rebuilt so often that almost nothing of the first fabric survives. What replaced it is a layered interior: a tower-house as presbytery base, a portal by Simone Sacella, a saint by Benzoni and paintings by Cavagna and Gandino.

Why it matters

San Giorgio stands above the medieval borgo along the strada di Valle, on the ground where Lovere's castle once closed the settlement. Its documentation reaches back to 1252, and its rebuilding history runs from a 1462 expansion to a full nineteenth-century reconstruction — a cross-section of the town's structural story in one church. The art inside is equally layered, with Brescian and Bergamasco painters of the late Renaissance and Baroque gathered around the martyr patron of the town.

What to notice

The church has an unusual footprint: the presbytery rests on the cut-down stump of the Torre Socha, a house-tower absorbed into the church when the building took a Latin-cross plan from 1462 onward. On the gabled facade, the sandstone portal of 1655 by the Lovere-born Simone Sacella carries above it a statue of Saint George by the neoclassical sculptor Giovanni Maria Benzoni, placed there in the early nineteenth century at the instigation of Count Luigi Tadini. The counter-facade bears Jan de Herdt's 1657 painting of Moses drawing water from the rock, Giovan Paolo Cavagna's Last Supper of 1589-1590, Antonio Gandino's Martyrdom of Saint George in a carved frame of the same years, and Antonio Cifrondi's two saints on horseback. Sculpture from the Fantoni workshop of Rovetta recurs throughout, from wooden angels to the Madonna del Rosario throne of 1721 over a sixteenth-century baptistery.

Context and history

Nothing remains of the first church recorded in 1252; from 1462 an enlargement gave the building its Latin-cross form, with the remains of the Torre Socha — cut down when the tower lost its defensive role — reused as the unusual base of the new presbytery. A seventeenth-century campaign renewed both interior and facade, and the interior took its present three-aisle shape in renovations of 1877-1878 by Giuseppe Pellini, with semicolumns and barrel vault; Giuliano Volpi painted the presbytery and apse in 1899-1900. In 1879 the church received the altar of the Madonna that Antonio Calegari had made in 1739 for San Barnaba in Brescia — one of several works the church gathered from elsewhere. The regional heritage catalogue of Lombardia Beni Culturali records the building's construction history as stretching from the twelfth to the nineteenth century, in line with this long chain of remakings.