A church does not become the church of a village in a day: it takes decades, and it wins one function at a time. Here in 1567 the parish priest already lived beside San Lorenzo, but the sacraments went on being given in another church, that of San Zenone. The parish was split between two addresses, and it took time for it to come together.
What to see
The first church of San Lorenzo was built in the fifteenth century and the right of patronage went to a local family, the De Prederis: it was they who maintained it and put forward the priest. In the seventeenth century the building was remodelled, and in 1739 a new one was built, the one that is today the parish church of Demo.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century three confraternities were active in the village: that of the Blessed Sacrament, that of Christian Doctrine and that of the Rosary. In a mountain village they were far more than prayer groups: they organised funerals, looked after the sick, guaranteed a form of mutual aid when no other existed.
Visiting
The church is in the hamlet of Demo, in the scattered municipality of Berzo Demo, in the upper Val Camonica; hours tied to services and possible closures during the week. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Look at the side altars. In village churches they nearly always belonged to the confraternities, who kept them up with their own dues and displayed their emblems there. Reading them in a row is a way of grasping how a community was organised before the state took charge of health, funerals and welfare.