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Brienno

Santi Nazaro e Celso, Brienno

Brienno's parish church sheer above the lake, rebuilt in Baroque style in the seventeenth century on an eleventh-century chapel: inside, Enea Salmeggia's altarpiece of 1618, a polyptych of 1508 and a supposed tooth of Frederick Barbarossa.

Visit duration
15–30 min
Booking
Not required
Area
First Basin
Brienno from the lake: the coloured houses squeezed between the water and the wooded slope, with the church's pale bell tower.Ottantafame · CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Maurizio Moro5153 · CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Ysogo · CC BY-SA 4.0

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Brienno from the lake: the coloured houses squeezed between the water and the wooded slope, with the church's pale bell tower.

Ottantafame · CC BY-SA 4.0

Why go

Sheer above the lake, the church of Santi Nazaro e Celso rose on an eleventh-century chapel, recorded in the pieve of Nesso from the late thirteenth century.

Today's building was rebuilt in Baroque forms between 1615 and 1689; traces of the Romanesque survive in the lower part of the bell tower. Inside are early sixteenth-century stained-glass windows and Enea Salmeggia's altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena, dated 1618, which once hung in the parish house. Another altarpiece of the Virgin with saints is by the brothers Giovan Battista and Giovanni Paolo Recchi, and in the sacristy is a polyptych painted in 1508 by Andrea de Passeri. The church also keeps a supposed relic of Frederick Barbarossa: a tooth wrapped in a fourteenth-century parchment.

  • Brienno's bell tower, seen from the boat above the houses on the water.
  • Salmeggia's altarpiece and the polyptych of 1508.

Highlights

  • Andrea de Passeri's polyptych of 1508
  • The early sixteenth-century stained glass
  • The Romanesque base of the bell tower

Getting there

  • It stands on Piazza dei Caduti at Brienno, on the western shore between Laglio and Argegno.
The church's apse and bell tower above a house, with a street lamp in front and the mountains behind.Boban475 · CC BY-SA 4.0

On the map

Explore the lake
NessoBriennoSanti Nazaro e Celso, Brienno

© OpenStreetMap contributors · ODbL

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