Chiesa di San Martino (Calozzo)

A few steps from the lakefront of Pianello del Lario, the parish church of San Martino carries nearly a millennium of documented worship, Renaissance frescoes, a goldsmith's processional cross of 1489 and the memory of the nine years Saint Luigi Guanella spent as its parish administrator.

Why it matters

San Martino is the mother church of Pianello del Lario and the oldest documented building in the parish. Its site belonged to the Benedictine abbey of San Carpoforo in Como, and the Guanellian pilgrimage itinerary records the church as documented from 1040; a deed of 1153 names a chapel of San Martino with a small cemetery beside it. Only in 1472, after Pianello secured its civil and ecclesiastical separation from the Corte di Musso, could the community raise San Martino to the dignity of a parish church, and the building has been reshaped repeatedly ever since. For the town it is also the church of Saint Luigi Guanella, who served here from November 1881 to 1890 before founding his charitable institutions.

What to notice

Beyond the columned portico, the Renaissance stone portal carries the carved date 1534 on its architrave, and the lunette above shows Saint Martin, a work attributed to Antonio Maria Caraccioli of Vercana. Inside, the single vaulted nave leads to the apse, where frescoes of prophets and Old Testament scenes by Isidoro Bianchi da Campione, a leading Lombard painter of the early seventeenth century, cover the conch. A sixteenth-century triptych shows the Madonna enthroned with Child between Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Bernard. Around the walls are works by Giovanni Battista Pozzo, by Giovan Battista Bottiggio, a native of Pianello, and by Giovan Maria Tagliaferri, who rebuilt and frescoed the ceiling in the nineteenth century. In the sacristy, the treasured piece is a silver processional cross made in 1489 by the goldsmith Francesco Ser Gregori of Gravedona, kept beside a Baroque wooden cabinet. The bronze door at the entrance depicts eight episodes from the life of beata Chiara Bosatta, born in this parish.

Context and history

The church's long rebuilding mirrors the town's history. Feudal rights of the Como abbey ended in 1389, when the territory passed to the Malacrida lords of Musso; the 1472 elevation to parish status followed nearly a century of dispute. The two side chapels went up between 1601 and 1620. In the eighteenth century an organ was installed at the counter-facade, which meant closing the rose window and opening new windows, and to the right of the church the Confraternita del Santissimo Sacramento built its own small oratory. The nineteenth century brought the new ceiling and Tagliaferri's frescoes. The rectory beside the church housed don Luigi Guanella from 1881 to 1890; in 1970 the right chapel was dedicated to him, the priest who became an internationally known saint. The slender fifteenth-century bell tower, with its conical spire, holds five bells cast by the Pruneri foundry in 1903.