Chiesa del Crocefisso

Across the old bridge at Combo stands the church everyone in Bormio calls del Crocefisso. Formally dedicated to Saint Anthony Abate, it guards a wooden crucifix credited with miraculous powers and carried through the town's streets in moments of collective danger since 1733.

Why it matters

The regional heritage catalogue explains the double name: the church was founded in honour of Saint Anthony Abate (originally together with Saint Augustine), yet everyone knows it as the church of the Holy Crucifix because of a wooden crucifix of legendary origin, perhaps from a German workshop of the fifteenth century, around which popular devotion has gathered with attributions of miraculous power. The parish documents solemn processions of the crucifix through the town in 1905, 1922, 1947, 1984, 2000 and 2016. For Bormio, the procession is an act of collective faith.

What to notice

Combo, the ancient district on the far bank of the Frodolfo, is linked to the rest of Bormio by an old arched bridge. The church fronts a small sanctuary square with a gabled facade pierced by a rose window. Over the entrance, a lunette fresco shows an Imago Pietatis of Renaissance taste; the apse exterior retains early-sixteenth-century painting. The walls are partly the fourteenth-century originals: inside, the tiny Crucifixion of 1376 hangs to the right of the presbytery arch, alongside two-level wall paintings by unknown painters working between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The apse cycle of about 1534 carries a secure attribution to Paolo da Caylina the Younger, a painter of large commissions around Brescia: music-making angels, saints, the four Evangelists, the Annunciation, and prophets with their names written out on the arch, while the apse walls narrate episodes from the life of Saint Anthony Abate. In the right-hand chapel, the crucifix itself rests on a marble altar of 1763 by the Buzzi brothers of Viggiù.

Context and history

The site was chosen by 1356, the building yard opened in 1368, and within a decade the work must have been finished, to judge from the dated Crucifixion fresco of 1376. The cult of the crucifix grew around it: a chapel to house the venerated image was begun in 1732, followed by the marble altar of 1763, and since 1733 the image has been solemnly carried through the streets of the town whenever the community has felt the need of special heavenly protection. The many ex-votos left by the faithful at the foot of the cross are now kept in the town's civic museum. The church's later features include a simple gabled exterior with a rose window and an eighteenth-century Lombard-style bell tower. Until modern times the district kept an agricultural vocation, and on 17 January, Saint Anthony's day, the animals of the parish were blessed on the churchyard in front of the church.