Collegiata di San Gaudenzio

On the highest point of Varallo's old town, behind a portico of twenty-eight arches, the collegiate church of San Gaudenzio keeps a major altarpiece by Gaudenzio Ferrari: a six-panel polyptych painted between 1517 and 1520. Eighteenth-century elegance outside, medieval foundations and Renaissance painting inside.

Why it matters

This is Varallo's parish church, and its position states its rank: the building crowns the rocky promontory of the borgo vecchio, reached by a monumental staircase and wrapped in a long arcaded portico whose twenty-eight arches on slender columns are the church's most visible exterior feature. Inside, the deep apse preserves the polyptych that Gaudenzio Ferrari painted for this site between 1517 and 1520, one of the key works of his maturity. The church is also the spiritual home of the Madonna Incoronata, the crowned wooden statue of 1633 to which Varallo's annual procession is dedicated — the patronal devotion that still organises the town's ritual calendar.

What to notice

The portico's twenty-eight arches on slender columns frame views over the rooftops towards the Sacro Monte opposite. The facade portal is carved stone; inside, a single nave runs past eight side chapels to the deep apse. In the presbytery, study the polyptych panel by panel: its six panels depict the Madonna and Child, Saint Catherine, Saint Joseph, Saint Peter, Saint Gaudenzio, a Pietà, Saint Mark and Saint John the Baptist. Two tondi of the Annunciation by his school hang on the right wall. In the third chapel on the right, the marble altar of 1720–23 by Carlo Gerolamo and Giuseppe Argenti of Veggiù, built to a design by the Varallo architect Giovanni Battista Morondi, frames the niche holding the wooden Madonna Incoronata of 1633, commissioned in thanksgiving for deliverance from plague; on the Monday after Pentecost the confraternities carry it in procession through the streets. The sacristy retains sixteenth-to-nineteenth-century furnishings and two 1702 canvases by the Dutch painter Giovanni Antonio de Grott.

Context and history

The site's sacred use is old: part of the Romanesque bell tower survives from the church documented in 1248, and a fragment of a fifteenth-century fresco of the nursing Madonna survives from the earlier church. Renovations began in the sixteenth century, but the building visitors see is essentially an eighteenth-century creation. From 1705 the provost Benedetto Ludovico Giacobini, a native of Fobello, drove the wholesale reconstruction of both exterior and interior, giving the church its present unity; the street below, Via Giacobini, still carries his name. The Argenti brothers' altar belongs to this long building campaign, in which medieval remains and Renaissance painting were incorporated into the renewed interior.