Chiesa di San Martino

Set apart from the town in the old cemetery, San Martino was Morbegno's first parish church, documented from the twelfth century. Its low porticoed body hides granite columns, mannerist frescoes of 1575, monochrome vaults painted in 1842 and a baroque ossuary.

Why it matters

Morbegno’s earliest medieval settlements grew around San Martino, documented from the twelfth century. By the end of that century, San Martino and the chapel of Santa Maria di Talamona were independent of the pieve of Ardenno under the Comascan monastery of Sant’Abbondio; an act of 1208 records this status. When the parish passed, in the fourteenth century, to the new church of San Pietro in the borgo, and later to the sixteenth-century San Giovanni Battista, San Martino kept the role no other building could take: the burial church, ringed by its cemetery, where the community's dead have been laid for eight centuries. The building records that continuity in stone, paint and inscriptions — including the marble altar paid for by emigrants as far away as Naples.

What to notice

The exterior sets the tone: a low gabled roof extends over a portico of three arches on pillars, first recorded in 1718, and mortuary plaques stud the massive walls. On the facade, a small Renaissance fresco of Saint Martin on horseback sharing his cloak with a beggar survives on the left; an eighteenth-century Saint George and the dragon, its companion, was lost during the restorations of the 1990s. Inside, a quadrangular hall opens into three naves on four rough granite columns, and the cross vaults are painted in monochrome by Angelo Greco of Morbegno, work of 1842 funded by a benefactors' consortium based in Rome. The high altar carries two twisted marble columns and an inscription — "Neapolis et patriae suffragiis" — recording its donation by Morbegnese emigrants in Naples; above it hangs the altarpiece of Saint Martin by Giacomo Paravicini, called il Gianolo (1660–1729). Two baroque marble altars mark the side chapels, Madonna di Loreto on the left and Santo Stefano on the right; in the left nave a fresco of the Madonna and Child with a kneeling donor is attributed to Vincenzo de Barberis. Outside the cemetery enclosure to the north stands the great ossuary, a porticoed, frescoed building of the mid-eighteenth century — dated around 1750 in one account and 1766 in another.

Context and history

The rebuilding of 1566 established the three-nave plan on four columns that remains visible today. A large bell is recorded as early as 1357; the tower took its present baroque form, with balustraded bell cell and cupolino, in 1766. The presbytery walls carry the oldest paintings in the building: a cycle of 1575 by Francesco Guaita of Como and Abondio Baruta of Domaso, an example of Lombard mannerism. The Martirio di Santo Stefano signed by the Milanese Giovan Pietro Gnocchi in 1591 was removed from the church during restoration and is now kept in the Collegiata of San Giovanni Battista. Eighteenth-century confessionals survive with the pulpit, and above one of them sits a small non-electrified organ brought here from the church of Sant'Antonio, the successor of an instrument recorded in 1737. The ossuary lost its funerary function in 1935.