Isola di San Giulio

One island belongs to Lake Orta, and it holds the lake's soul: San Giulio, barely offshore from Orta San Giulio, with a Romanesque basilica at its centre and a community of Benedictine nuns at its edge. Water, stone and deliberate silence define its setting.

Why it matters

The island's devotional character, Romanesque basilica and working monastery are central to Lake Orta's history. The basilica, convent and waterfront form a distinctive ensemble.

What to notice

• The Basilica of San Giulio, a twelfth-century church with three naves and a protruding transept, standing on foundations that go back much further: excavation has revealed an early basilica of the fifth or sixth century.
• The Romanesque ambo, early twelfth-century sculpture in green serpentino marble from the Oira quarries, supported on four mismatched columns. Its parapet reads like a carved moral drama — a centaur shooting at a deer attacked by beasts, the symbols of the evangelists, a griffin biting a crocodile — battles of good against evil in stone.
• The enigmatic robed figure on the ambo with a tau-shaped staff, debated for a century: candidates proposed include Saint Julius, Guglielmo da Volpiano (born on the island in 962), Emperor Otto I and others.
• Frescoes from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, including works of the Cagnola workshop and Sperindio Cagnola; the oldest dated painting is a Saint Anthony Abbot of 1461.
• The Mater Ecclesiae abbey, where Benedictine nuns maintain a contemplative community and pursue restoration, weaving and icon painting.
• The island's association with silence and faith is reflected in meditative plaques along its waterfront.

Context and history

Tradition says Saint Julius, a priest from the Greek island of Aegina, reached this shore around 390, freed the islet of its dragons — an image of paganism defeated — and founded here the hundredth and last of his churches, dedicated to the Twelve Apostles. Archaeology confirms early Christian buildings beneath the present church. After destructions in the tenth century, imperial and episcopal patronage rebuilt the island's church, and the twelfth-century basilica was modelled on Novara's old cathedral, with baroque additions layered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A seventeenth-century crypt holds the remains of Saint Julius and other saints.

Monastic life returned in 1973, when Benedictine nuns from the abbey of Viboldone settled beside the basilica at the invitation of the bishop of Novara, founding the Mater Ecclesiae abbey that now anchors the island's contemplative identity. Medieval processions crossed the same water to reach the island.