In 1585 the father provincial Crisostamo da Rivello had the Capuchin convent of Sant'Antonio di Padova built at Tolve, outside the walls like the village's other extramural churches. Then the built-up area grew and swallowed it: today the convent stands inside the urban core, while Tolve's other religious foundations are still scattered through the countryside. It stopped working as a convent in 1865, outliving by more than fifty years the suppression laws of 1809 that should have closed it.
What to see
The building had two floors, the ground floor included. Below were the guest quarters, the kitchen, the refectory, the cellar and the store; above, nineteen small cells, one per friar. The church, small and plain, was dedicated to the Madonna dell'Olivo, the same image stamped on the convent's seal: an olive stump with a dark-faced Virgin seated on it, a child in her arms. It stood in a niche in the left nave. Next to the convent lay a large vegetable garden, worked by the lay brothers.
Between 1650 and 1671 a succession of superiors and guardians from Tolve ran the house, among them father Ludovico and father Antonio, and under their direction it reached its peak. Those were years when the fief kept changing hands and the friars acted as teachers of learning and of trades. Relations with the other convent in town, the Franciscan Santissima Annunziata, were strained: they quarrelled over precedence in processions and over money, but the real split was one of principle. The Capuchins stood on poverty and humility; the Franciscan conventuals handled cash and land, and their house was to all intents and purposes a business.
Visiting
You reach the convent on foot from the centre, which makes it the easiest of Tolve's religious buildings to get to: the others are out in the countryside, some of them reduced to ruins. The scale is that of a poor foundation, so the visit is short. Look at the left nave first, where the niche of the Madonna dell'Olivo stood, then try to read how the rooms were shared out over the two floors. For opening times, ask in the village.
Our editors' tip
Do the two convents one after the other, this one and the Santissima Annunziata, and hold them side by side: 200 hectares of land, 1300 sheep and 75 cattle on one side, nineteen cells and a vegetable garden on the other. The difference the chronicles talk about, the one the friars quarrelled over, makes more sense that way than on the page.