Sacro Monte di Orta

Above the village of Orta San Giulio, a wooded promontory carries twenty chapels strung along a garden path: each one a life-size theatrical scene in painted terracotta and fresco, staging the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. It forms part of the UNESCO-listed Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy.

Why it matters

The Sacri Monti were the Renaissance answer to a problem: with Jerusalem out of reach for most pilgrims, the Counter-Reformation built substitute Holy Lands in the Alps. Orta's, begun in 1590, is devoted entirely to one saint and is noted for having kept its sixteenth-century topographic layout unaltered. The result is a rare fusion of landscape gardening, sculpture, painting and devotion — capped by a panorama over the lake and the Island of San Giulio.

What to notice

• The sequence of twenty chapels, from Francis's birth through his conversion, the stigmata and his death, each chapel combining life-size painted statues with frescoed backgrounds so architecture, sculpture and painting read as one scene.
• The quality of the sculptural casts: 376 statues were created for the complex, by artists including Cristoforo Prestinari, the d'Enrico brothers and Dionigi Bussola, with frescoes by the Fiammenghini, il Morazzone, the Nuvolone brothers and Federico Bianchi.
• The garden itself — the UNESCO rationale praises the exceptional quality of a garden that has kept its original design since the sixteenth century.
• The church of Saints Nicolao and Francesco at the end of the path, a proto-Romanesque building remodelled in the seventeenth century to echo the Lower Basilica of Assisi.
• The viewpoint from the highest chapels: the island, the village rooftops and the whole length of the lake.

Context and history

Orta's Franciscan devotional hill was first conceived in 1583 — an idea modelled on Varallo — and from 1590 the abbot Amico Canobio carried it into execution, entrusting the layout to the Capuchin father Cleto da Castelletto Ticino. Between 1593 and 1615 the bishop of Novara, Carlo Bascapè, drove the works, fixing the sequence of scenes and recruiting leading artists of the Milanese and Novarese workshops. The original programme envisaged more than thirty chapels; twenty were built, completed in later phases into the eighteenth century.

In 2003 the complex was inscribed, with the other Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy, on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The hill is also a Special Natural Reserve (established by regional law in 1980), so the walk combines devotional art with a protected wood of chestnut and other native trees. At the end of the route, the church of Saints Nicolao and Francesco houses a venerated wooden Madonna of Sorrows.