San Lorenzo, Mandello del Lario

The seventeenth-century building replaces an earlier church; its Romanesque bell tower, dating from around the twelfth century, was a defensive tower of the fortified village. The Baroque interior retains the carved and gilded Serassi organ of 1764, a carved tabernacle and a canopied altar in polychrome wood. Parts of the Benedictine abbey, already in existence in 833, remain attached to the church; opposite stands the octagonal Chapel of the Dead. Next door, the former seat of the Santa Marta confraternity houses the Museum of Sacred Art, with paintings, sculptures, a fifteenth-century processional cross and votive pictures from the church at Debbio.