Chiesa Evangelica Luterana della Santissima Trinità

A steep gable, a polychrome maiolica roof and a slender spire mark Arco's Lutheran church, built for German and Austrian spa guests around 1900.

Why it matters

Arco's late nineteenth-century fame as a winter health resort drew thousands of guests from north of the Alps, and this church is the most tangible trace of that world. A committee, the Comité der Evangelischen in Arco, organised Protestant worship and commissioned a dedicated building; its first stone was laid in 1897 and the church was inaugurated in 1900. The FAI notes that the building was the first church in the region to have a heating system, a notable feature for a winter resort. Its story since has swung between confessions and uses, which makes it a compact history of the borderland itself.

What to notice

The roof is covered in coloured maiolica tiles, a flourish on a building otherwise drawn in red and grey stone. The gable facade rises to a steep pitch, and a slender bell tower with a tall spire stands to its right; large tripartite stained-glass windows run along the sides. The style is deliberately eclectic, blending north German building traditions with Tyrolean ones and filtering neo-Gothic through the German Art Nouveau known as Jugendstil — the FAI calls the result an architectural jewel. Inside, a single austere nave follows the northern models, with a low running atrium supporting the ogival vault; the wooden pulpit, altar and large crucifix were made by the Colli brothers of Innsbruck. The acoustics complement the restrained interior.

Context and history

The church belongs to the decades when the Garda climate made Arco a Winterkurort for the Habsburg world, and its founding committee answered a practical need of the transalpine colony. Designed by the Hamburg architect Heinrich Fricke and built by the firm of Paolo Peterlongo and Francesco Tomasi of Riva, it served its congregation only briefly at full strength. The First World War turned it into a stable and soldiers' lodging; it was damaged by an Italian grenade and its bells were requisitioned, replacements arriving in 1926. In 1934-35 the Catholic community took the building over as a subsidiary of Arco's collegiate church and rededicated it to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux; it returned to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Italy, seated at Merano, in the early 1970s. The Friuli earthquake of 1976 caused fresh damage, and restoration campaigns ran from 1991 to 1994 and again from 2011 to 2019. The FAI has supported conservation efforts through the Giornata FAI d'Autunno and I Luoghi del Cuore. The building's history includes both Lutheran worship and Catholic use.