Chiesa di Santa Caterina

Corvara's oldest church stands beside its cemetery on the Col Alt road, a late Gothic building that guards the only well-preserved winged altar in the whole of Val Badia. Its panels of 1520 carry both a Titian legend and a scholarly attribution to the Danube School painter Albrecht Altdorfer.

Why it matters

Every mountain village keeps one building that predates everything else around it, and in Corvara this is it. The church of Saint Catherine of Alexandria appears in written records in 1347 and was consecrated in 1452, making it the first church of the village and the oldest holy place in the municipality. For more than five centuries it served as the parish church, only yielding that role when a new church was built in 1959. What lifts it above local interest is the altarpiece: a winged altar of 1520 that survived, while comparable works across the Val Badia did not, and that connects this small Ladin village to one of the most inventive moments in Alpine art, the passage from late Gothic to Renaissance.

What to notice

Give the altar time. On the outer wing, the martyrdom of Saint Catherine is painted in scene detail, and the two landscape panels are the ones that feed the Titian legend: village tradition held that the great Venetian, supposedly passing through Corvara, painted them himself. The regional tourism portal instead attributes the work to Albrecht Altdorfer of the so-called Danube School, the movement celebrated as the bridge between late Gothic and Renaissance painting.

Look also for the frescoes inside, including what the tourism portal describes as the oldest painting of Saint Catherine, placed on the left wall near the entrance. The church is surrounded by its cemetery.

Context and history

The documented life of the church begins in 1347; the consecration followed in 1452, and the building took its present late Gothic character in that era. The winged altar was produced in 1520 by the workshop of Ruprecht Potsch and was fully restored in 1975, emerging as the only well-preserved altar of its kind in the churches of the Val Badia. The regional portal attributes the panels to Albrecht Altdorfer, while its sister portal credits the altar to Ruprecht Potsch's workshop. The church remained Corvara's parish church until 1959, when the new parish church, dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was built to designs by the architect Erich Pattis. The old church remains consecrated and retains its churchyard.