In 1580 Charles Borromeo came up the Val Camonica on a pastoral visit, entered this chapel and ordered it rebuilt. The order of an archbishop of Milan carried weight, but it was no miracle: the works began only in the following century, when the bishop of Brescia took an interest. In the valleys the pace of the Church was the pace of the village's resources.
What to see
The original chapel is documented from the fourteenth century and depended on the pieve of San Siro di Cemmo, the mother church of this part of the valley. Only later did Berzo obtain its own parish, with a font and the right to bury its dead at home.
The building you see today is the seventeenth-century one, restored in the eighteenth. In the nineteen-sixties, as in nearly every Italian church, the presbytery was reorganised according to the rules of the Council: an altar turned towards the faithful and a new ambo.
Visiting
The church is in the settlement of Berzo, which is the seat of the scattered municipality of Berzo Demo, in the upper Val Camonica; hours tied to services, and on weekdays it may be closed. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Go and see the parish church of Demo as well, the other hamlet. Two neighbouring villages, two complete parishes, a single municipality with a double name and no main centre: proof that neither ever agreed to think of itself as the other's outskirts. In the mountains a bell tower is a border.