Chiesa dei Santi Antonio Abate e Antonio di Padova

Two saints share this name and this church: Anthony the Abbot and Anthony of Padua. The building succeeds an older wooden predecessor and preserves a painted altarpiece, a nineteenth-century canvas and a cycle of early printed Stations of the Cross.

Why it matters

This small church on Via Sant’Antoni is dedicated to both Saint Anthony the Abbot and Saint Anthony of Padua. Its double dedication to two different Anthonies reflects two strands of popular devotion, the abbot associated with protection of people and animals, the Paduan friar with the recovery of lost things and lost health. Its artworks document craftsmen and painters active across the central Alps.

What to notice

A painted altarpiece depicts Saint Anthony Abbot with Saint John of Nepomuk and Saint Lucy in ecstasy before the Virgin and Child, the work of an unidentified painter and dated on stylistic grounds to around 1750. Opposite, a nineteenth-century canvas by Felice Carbonera shows the dying Saint Joseph supported by a youthful Christ beside a sorrowing Virgin. The high altar, probably from the second half of the eighteenth century, resembles the Rosary altar in the parish church so closely that the altar may have been made by the same Valtellina woodcarvers, Mattias Peder of Slais and Giovanni Fait. In two glazed cases on the nave walls hang fourteen printed Stations of the Cross from the seventeenth century, said to come from southern Germany or Austria, an unusual survival of devotional printmaking.

Context and history

A church stood here before 1557; the earlier building was probably wooden, with a gable bell tower. Between 1655 and 1665 the present masonry structure replaced it, designed and supervised by the master builder Battista Re. A loggia, reached by an external stair, was finished in 1667-1668 and the sacristy followed in 1669; the roof raised between 1705 and 1707 used timber from the wood of Gallo. The bell tower went up between 1720 and 1723 under master Pietro Margantina. In 1740-1742 a side altar dedicated to Saint John of Nepomuk was added, its design attributed to Andrea Fantina, an architect from the Vallemaggia in Ticino. In 1614, Sant’Antonio and San Rocco were both within the parish. In 1648, together with San Rocco, the church was erected as a coadjutor benefit, a step towards greater autonomy for Livigno's growing population.