Statua di San Giovanni Nepomuceno

Beside the water at the edge of Morbegno's old town stands a baroque statue of San Giovanni Nepomuceno, carved in 1756 by the Ticinese sculptor Giovan Battista Adami. It is all that survives of the mule-backed bridge swept away when the Bitto burst its banks in 1882 — the town's silent guardian against the waters.

Why it matters

Morbegno commemorated its history of flooding in the statue. In the eighteenth century the town placed the Bohemian saint John of Nepomuk — martyred by drowning and invoked across Europe as a protector against inundation — on the old bridge, entrusting the crossing and the houses behind it to him. When a violent flood destroyed the bridge in 1882, the statue endured, and the community kept it in place as the last physical piece of a structure that had defined the riverbank for generations. The monument therefore works on two levels: a devotional figure of European type, and a rare case of a lost piece of civil engineering surviving through a single carved witness. The statue remains a landmark in the town's relationship with the river.

What to notice

The pedestal is crowned by a cherubic head and bears Morbegno's civic coat of arms, with a sword and two keys honouring the city's protectors, Saints Peter and Paul — evidence of the statue's civic commission. The saint himself is shown in the standard Nepomuk manner, with the features and insignia of the confessor-priest whose silence before the crown cost him his life. The carving is attributed to Giovan Battista Adami, a sculptor from Ticino. The space around the statue preserves the alignment of the bridge's approach and the former crossing.

Context and history

The old bridge of Morbegno was a hump-backed, mule-track-style structure of the kind the Valtellina built wherever pack routes needed the rivers crossed. Rivers here are violent: the mountain torrents that feed the Adda can rise catastrophically after alpine storms, and lowland towns suffered repeated flooding. The consortium's record fixes the fatal event in 1882, when a spate of the torrente Bitto destroyed the bridge; the reference encyclopaedia entry for Morbegno describes the statue as placed for the town's protection against the fury of the waters that more than once invaded the historic centre. Nepomuk's cult spread through central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries precisely along bridges, and this commission of 1756 sits squarely in that tradition. That the figure survived the 1882 disaster gave it a second life as a memorial, and the town has kept it on the riverbank since.