Santuario della Santissima Pietà

The Sanctuary of the Santissima Pietà rises over the rooms where, in the winter of 1522, a painted image of the dead Christ was said to have bled; it is the spiritual heart of Cannobio. It holds the bloodstained cloths of that event, the Sacra Costa relic, and a panel painting attributed to Gaudenzio Ferrari above the image.

Why it matters

The sanctuary's story centres on a precisely dated event. A parchment image of Christ in Pietà hung in an upper room of the Zaccheo family home in Cannobio's lakeside borgo. It was said to have bled on several days in January and February 1522; on 9 January a small bloodied rib — the Sacra Costa — fell from the wound onto a cloth below. Those cloths are still kept in an urn beneath the high altar of the sanctuary that grew out of the house. For Cannobio the building is not one attraction among many: the miracle shaped the town's identity, its confraternity, and a candlelight feast, the Lumineri, that still fills the lakeside each 7 January.

What to notice

Stand before the high altar and work in three layers. In a niche at the centre is the original parchment image, small and dark, of Christ in Pietà between Mary and John the Evangelist. Directly above it hangs a panel painting attributed to Gaudenzio Ferrari, the Piedmontese master. Beneath the altar mensa, the urn holds the bloodstained cloths. The building itself deserves attention too: it is late-Renaissance in character, with seventeenth-century stuccoes, frescoes and paintings added as the sanctuary matured, and its walls rise literally over the stone rooms of the old borgo houses.

Context and history

In 1524, two years after the miracle, the Confraternita della Devozione was formed and converted the upper rooms of the house into a small chapel. San Carlo Borromeo celebrated his penultimate Mass there and called for a great sanctuary on the site. In the following century the decision was taken to build a proper church. The design is attributed to the circle of Pellegrino Tibaldi, and construction with local labour ran from 1575 to 1614, financed by the townspeople and devotees rather than by a single patron, with the works directed by the Beretta masters of Brissago. The relic of the Sacra Costa was carried in procession to the parish church, where it remains in a reliquary that Cardinal Federico Borromeo donated in 1605. The sanctuary today is a diocesan sanctuary of the Diocese of Novara, and the Lumineri procession on 7 January, with thousands of candles, commemorates the nights of the miracle.