Chiesa di San Girolamo in Ponteterra

At Ponteterra, one of Sabbioneta's outlying frazioni, the parish church of San Girolamo pairs a sober exposed-brick facade with a chain of eight chapels, each different from the next. It also contains La camera picta dé Confratelli, a confraternity hall frescoed with Old Testament scenes.

Why it matters

Ponteterra's church records how faith was organised on the rural edge of a ducal project. A priest is attested here from the second half of the sixteenth century, which means a church already existed while Sabbioneta itself was being rebuilt as an ideal city. From 1630 an oratory beside the church housed the confraternity of the Santo Rosario, ringed by its own cemetery; the church's most curious room belongs to the other lay brotherhood, that of the Blessed Sacrament. La camera picta dé Confratelli was frescoed with unusual Old Testament scenes for the Confraternita del SS. Sacramento.

The parish church preserves layers of local devotion and works dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

What to notice

The facade is in exposed brick, with three pinnacles and a quadrilobed opening. Its niches once held statues, still recorded in 1913; the rose window was later walled up when the Balbiani organ was installed on the counter-facade. A painted Crucifixion of 1683 is above the entrance.

The single nave has a barrel vault and four chapels on each side, each with distinctive decoration. In the last chapel on the left stands a fine wooden crucifix of the mid-eighteenth century, recalling the elegant manner of Bertesi; the chapel on the right holds a gilded, brightly coloured Spanish-style retablo, arranged as a perspective around the statue of the Madonna del Rosario. In the presbytery, the high altar is an eighteenth-century work of inlaid polychrome marbles and mother-of-pearl, with a neoclassical walnut choir of fourteen stalls behind it.

Context and history

Works were carried out on the church in 1673, and its facade was raised in 1685. In 1718 the community petitioned Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla and Sabbioneta and Prince of Bozzolo, to enlarge the church. The choir and bell tower were substantially worked on in 1777; the eighteenth century also brought work to the sacristy and the tower clock. The church as it substantially appears today was solemnly dedicated on 21 November 1887 by Monsignor Geremia Bonomelli, Bishop of Cremona, in whose diocese the frazione lies. A pastoral visit of 1926 flagged conservation needs that were only carried out in 1945.

The confraternity hall’s Old Testament cycle preserves this lay devotional tradition.