Chiesa di San Vincenzo

San Vincenzo stands beside Santa Maria del Tiglio in Gravedona's historic sacred quarter. The former pieve church combines remnants of an eleventh-century building with the marble altars and chapels of its baroque transformation.

Why it matters

The church preserves evidence of Gravedona's early Christian community and its later role as a religious centre. A marble inscription commemorating Agnella and Onoria belongs to the early sixth century, linking the building with a much older history than its present interior suggests.

What to notice

Six side chapels flank the single nave. Among their paintings are a Miracle of Saint Blaise dated 1611, attributed to Giovanni Luigi Valesio, and Giovanni Baglione's Holy Family of 1620. Pietro Giacomo Longhi created the polychrome-marble high altar in 1757–1759; Carlo Innocenzo Carloni's Glory of Saint Vincent, dated 1765, occupies the apse. A crypt survives beneath the presbytery.

Context and history

An eleventh-century rebuilding was consecrated in 1072. Frequent flooding prompted major reconstruction during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, retaining only parts of the Romanesque fabric and raising the floor level. The presbytery was enlarged with a polygonal apse in 1726, adding another stage to this long sequence of alteration.