Chiesa del Santo Spirito

A plain brick shell at the top of Via Roma conceals one of the densest fresco interiors in Alta Valtellina, so rich that locals call the deconsecrated church of Santo Spirito the Sistine Chapel of Bormio. Its frescoes include votive saints, donors in fashionable dress, a Coronation and a vaulted Trinity.

Why it matters

The destination portal opens its historic-centre itinerary with this small church, antecedent to the fourteenth century, and hands it a nickname no other building in Bormio carries: la cappella Sistina di Bormio. The comparison is not about size but saturation — nearly every surface of the little single-room church is painted, and the regional heritage catalogue notes that studies of the surviving paintings are still under way, so new attributions continue to emerge. The building is also a document of the street it fronts: the start of central Via Roma was the Via Magna of the Middle Ages, one of the principal access roads to the town, and the church stood there to greet travellers, its outer wall once dominated by a huge image of Saint Christopher, protector of those on the move.

What to notice

The facade portal and rose window were walled up after the building lost its religious role; a side doorway remains. The votive frescoes of the hall, some referred to the Bormio painter Luigi Sermondi and dated around 1475, show saints under personal commission; the catalogue points out two donor figures, a man and a woman in sumptuous, fashionable quattrocento clothes, recognised as the work of the Milanese Bartolino de Buri with his cultivated, up-to-date manner. On the curved wall of the apse, Sermondi's Coronation of the Virgin of 1475 crowds saints and angels into a luminous hierarchy. The surprise is overhead: the barrel vault, painted in 1528 under a contract with Gian Andrea de Magistris of Como, with the Trinity in the central medallion, music-making angels, the four Evangelists, the Virgin and Apostles seated on a wooden choir, and the Doctors of the Church absorbed in study at the margins.

Context and history

The church stands in the district called Dossiglio, in an area of ancient settlement, and is mentioned in a document of 1304; its character suggests a rebuilding in the first half of the fifteenth century. The interior's pictorial face took shape between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through Sermondi, de Buri and other painters whose identities remain elusive; as late as the end of the nineteenth century, donors' names and dates were still legible on the walls, the oldest referring to 1456, though time has since erased them. The building's fortunes reversed in the nineteenth century, when it was deconsecrated and used as a hay barn and warehouse — an impropriety that cost the furnishings, though the gilded early-sixteenth-century altarpiece now in the nearby church of San Vitale is thought to have come from here, its main image the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles. The Municipality later restored the structure, according to the regional record.