Chiesa di Sant'Alessandro (Capriate d'Adda)

The frazione of Capriate d'Adda preserves the deepest Christian roots of the municipality: its community appears in records from 948–949, and today's parish church of Sant'Alessandro, designed by engineer Luigi Angelini, was begun in 1910 and opened for worship in 1913 to serve a population swollen by the nearby Crespi factory.

Why it matters

Few parish histories in the Bergamo lowland reach back past the year 950. This one does, and it also dramatizes the industrial transformation of the Adda valley: the arrival of the Crespi enterprise in 1878 grew the village so quickly that the old church no longer held its congregation, forcing a rebuild on a new scale. The result is a documented, datable work by Luigi Angelini, one of the architects who shaped twentieth-century church building in Lombardy.

What to notice

The chronology is readable in the building itself: an incomplete body for years, a facade that arrived two decades after the opening, and side chapels filled with frescoes only in the 1950s.

Context and history

A first church stood where the parvis and town hall now are, consecrated in 1468; a replacement rose from 1730, and in 1864 architect Angelo Cotto added an expansion with a new facade. Angelini's church received its first stone on 5 May 1910 and was opened on 8 March 1913 by bishop Giacomo Radini Tedeschi. The facade waited until 1933, the side chapels and decorations were completed during 1952–55 and after, and solemn consecration followed on 15 June 1963.