Basilica Collegiata di San Vittore

The green copper dome of San Vittore is a defining feature of Intra's skyline. Built over more than two centuries on the site of a church documented in 1031, the basilica became Verbania's mother church when its patron saint was formally proclaimed in 1992, and holds the city's largest organ, a sixteenth-century baptismal font and early paintings by Daniele Ranzoni.

Why it matters

San Vittore is the civic and religious heart of Intra, the quarter whose medieval pieve once governed most of the Verbano. Its scale — a temple-fronted portico, a single aisle with side chapels, and a dome that oversails the rooftops — records the commercial confidence of a lakeside town that called itself the little Manchester of Lake Maggiore. The patronal feast on 8 May, with a procession from the basilica down to the port and the blessing of the lake, has long been part of the city's civic tradition, and the building's art and furnishings reflect the history of Intra's principal church.

What to notice

The neoclassical pronaos of four columns, designed at the end of the eighteenth century, gives the facade a temple-like form. The dome above was first sheathed in lead and later in the green copper you see now; the bell tower beside it was raised between 1840 and 1877 and carries eight bells cast by the Mazzola foundry of Valduggia. The lunette of the second chapel on the right contains the recently restored Predica del Battista, an early work by Daniele Ranzoni, who went on to lead the Scapigliatura movement in Lombard painting. Panels from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, rescued from the demolished medieval church, hang alongside. The sixteenth-century baptismal font predates the present building's completion, and the organ case on the counterfacade conceals the largest organ in Verbania: three manuals of 61 notes, a 32-note pedalboard and 39 registers, built by the Serassi family in the late eighteenth century and restored and modernised in 1932 by Vincenzo Mascioni.

Context and history

A Romanesque church stood here by 1031, when a parchment names it as the reference church of the pieve that administered much of the lake territory. The present building began in the early seventeenth century from designs associated with Filippo Cagnola, with the orientation later altered; it was consecrated in 1752 while facade and dome were still missing. The neoclassical entrance portico followed in the 1790s, and the great dome by Alfonso Parrocchetti completed the structure — the renovated church was finally inaugurated on 8 September 1889. San Vittore had long been Intra's patron; when the comuni of Intra and Pallanza merged into Verbania, the basilica was confirmed as the city's principal church in 1992, and the May procession and lake blessing formalised its civic role. Later interior decoration includes Lombard barocchetto fresco work in the dome drum, transept and presbytery.