Chiesa di Sant'Anna (Calozzo)

Raised in 1652 by emigrants who begged heaven to spare their village from the plague, the church of Sant'Anna gives the hamlet that grew around it both its name and its centre: a modest seventeenth-century building that keeps an altarpiece tied to one of Pianello's own painters.

Why it matters

Every church on the western shore has a reason, and Sant'Anna's is written in its founding. Local tradition records that the building went up in 1652 thanks to contributions from Pianellesi who had emigrated, and who wanted a place of prayer to invoke protection from the plague that stalked seventeenth-century Lombardy. The Lombardy regional heritage catalogue conservatively dates the structure to the seventeenth century, matching the foundation tradition. Around the church grew a hamlet once known as Pianello Grande, which in the mid-nineteenth century took the name Sant'Anna from its church; the building therefore explains the very identity of one of the town's frazioni.

What to notice

The church opens onto a small square toward which nearly all the lanes of the hamlet converge; for centuries this piazzetta has been the meeting point of the community. Inside, the altarpiece deserves the longest look: painted in 1661, it shows the Virgin with Child and Saint Anne, and it is associated with Giovan Battista Bottiggio, a painter born at Pianello del Lario whose work also appears in the parish church of San Martino. The portico in front was added in 1726 at the expense of the neighbouring Perpenti family, one of the local households that enriched the building over the generations. On the bell tower, two bells hang in memory of the Second World War, installed in 1949 in thanksgiving for the return of the village's soldiers.

Context and history

The church's story runs through the families and fortunes of Calozzo. Its 1652 foundation by emigrants mirrors a pattern visible across Pianello, where money earned in Genoa, Milan and beyond returned home as chapels and altars. Wealthy local families and ordinary parishioners continued to fund improvements, the Perpenti portico of 1726 among them. The post-war years brought both devotion and loss: the 1949 bells were a gesture of gratitude, while works of the same period destroyed an old well that once stood beside the building. The church has remained a place of worship since the seventeenth century.