Chiesa parrocchiale dei Santi Gervasio e Protasio con Battistero di San Giovanni

On the little church square at the heart of Baveno stand two of the oldest buildings on the Italian shore of Lake Maggiore: the Romanesque parish church of Saints Gervasius and Protasius and, beside it, a baptistery whose origins reach back to the early Christian centuries, both wrapped in the local pink granite that made Baveno famous.

Why it matters

The baptistery is the rarer of the two buildings. Its plain plastered exterior suggests the Renaissance, but research cited by the municipal tourism portal places its origins in the fifth century, centuries before any other building on the square. The church next to it carries a Romanesque gabled facade of squared stone, and the pair anchor a square that still reads as the medieval centre of the town, complete with a Via Crucis portico and the old Palazzo Pretorio.

What to notice

Two Roman inscribed slabs are set into the church facade; the municipal description interprets them as evidence that the hill above the lake may have been a place of worship before the Christian church. The facade itself is Romanesque, dated around 1150 to 1175, roofed in beola stone, while the bell tower beside it is older still, built around 1050 to 1075 on a square base and rising through six storeys with bricked-up single windows.

Inside, the church preserves fifteenth-century frescoes, eighteenth-century altar frontals, and a small but distinguished group of paintings: two panels attributed to the Piedmontese painter Defendente Ferrari, an Annunciation by Camillo Procaccini, a sixteenth-century wooden crucifix, and a frescoed Golgotha scene painted in the mid-nineteenth century by the brothers Andrea and Giovanni Francinetti of Gignese.

The baptistery requires a shift of perspective. You step down three stages into an interior that is octagonal although the outside walls are square, with rectangular and semicircular niches cut into the thickness of the masonry. The frescoes on the tiburio and vault date from the early sixteenth century, with the Eternal holding the globed cross at the crown of the vault; the wall paintings are nineteenth-century work. The eighteenth-century portico in front rests on four granite columns, a quiet reminder of the material the town is built on.

Context and history

The church is recorded as having been consecrated by Bishop Amidano on 25 July 1345, and its core is described as eleventh-century; substantial restructuring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries added chapels, side buttresses, the vaulted ceiling, the apse and the sacristy, while a small portico added in 1841 was lost in 1935. The baptistery was restored in 1732, 1795 and 1888, according to the historical survey of the town.

The square itself took its present form in 1839, when the cemetery was moved out of the historic centre. A portico around the square holds the stations of the Via Crucis, ending at an ancient funeral chapel that became the fourteenth station, the Sepulchre, containing a wooden statue of Christ with the instruments of the Passion. The municipal record of the eleventh-century town hall, on the same square, now houses the tourist office and the Granum museum , confirming how long this ground has been the civic centre of Baveno.