Isola San Giulio

Isola San Giulio holds a Romanesque basilica, a Benedictine monastery of cloistered nuns and a devotional path associated with silence. The island's stone buildings, surrounding water and church bells shape its distinctive character.

Why it matters

Isola San Giulio is the defining image of Lake Orta and a rare case of an island that is at once a monument, a working monastery and a frazione — a hamlet — of the surrounding municipality. Tradition makes it the cradle of Christianity in the Novarese: legend tells that the islet was once infested by dragons and serpents until St Julius sailed out across the water and, founding his hundredth church here in the late fourth century, subdued them — on the site of today's basilica. The island later held a fortress powerful enough to be considered impregnable, demolished in the nineteenth century to make way for a seminary, whose buildings passed to Benedictine cloistered nuns when the seminary closed. Since 1984 the nuns have maintained a school for the restoration of textiles and tapestries linked to Florence's Opificio delle pietre dure. The Via del Silenzio e della Meditazione adds a devotional dimension to the island's history.

What to notice

The palace of the bishop, monastery and basilica rise close together among the island's stone buildings. The basilica's Romanesque ambo is a square pulpit of grey-green stone from the Oira quarries, resting on four columns and carved with a griffin, eagle, winged lion, angel, ox, centaur and other creatures. An urn said to hold Saint Julius's remains rests in the crypt. The museum and sacristy preserve a fossil vertebra, Queen Maria Cristina's wedding mantle and fifteenth-century painted panels. Three apses define the Romanesque exterior, while Giovanni Battista Cantalupi's eighteenth-century frescoes cover the interior vaults.

Context and history

The island's story begins, according to tradition, with St Julius, who chose the islet for the hundredth of his churches; the basilica that bears his name grew into the religious heart of the lake. In the medieval period the island became a stronghold of the bishops of Novara, its castle so formidable that contemporaries called it unassailable; the nineteenth century reversed that identity when the fortress was pulled down to build the seminary that gave the island its enduring clerical character. When the seminary shut, the Benedictine nuns of the Mater Ecclesiae abbey — a community founded in 1973 — took over the monastic buildings, and their presence — contemplative life, spiritual hospitality, and the textile-restoration school founded in 1984 with ties to the Opificio delle pietre dure — shapes the island's atmosphere today. The devotional perimeter path, developed with the monastic community, adds a later layer to the island's religious history.