Chiesa di San Nicola

The parish church of San Nicola is the historic centre of religious life in La Thuile. First documented in 1093, it was rebuilt after a fire in 1794 and preserves a venerated wooden crucifix, an eighteenth-century tabernacle and paintings by Ettore Mazzini.

Why it matters

A parchment of 1093 records Bishop Bosone II of Aosta ceding the church and the hospice of the Little St Bernard Pass to the convent of Saint-Gilles in Verrès. In 1466 the parish came under the direct jurisdiction of the bishop of Aosta. The present church was rebuilt in 1796 after a fire during the revolutionary wars, layering medieval documentary history with the community's later reconstruction.

What to notice

The church has a single hall with two lateral apses and a presbytery; fragments of altars with twisted columns survive in the apses. An eighteenth-century tabernacle, brought from the convent of Santa Caterina in Aosta, stands behind the stone altar. A wooden crucifix dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth century hangs on the triumphal arch. A Latin inscription on the vault recounts the tradition of its survival in the 1794 fire. Ettore Mazzini's 1945 paintings depict episodes from the lives of Christ and Saint Nicholas.

Context and history

The parish grew with the scattered settlements of the valley, while the chapels of its hamlets remained dependent on the mother church. The crucifix's survival in the 1794 fire became part of local memory. The mid-twentieth-century Mazzini cycle belongs to the church's post-war renewal.