Above the church, on the knoll, there was a castle belonging to the Griffi family: it is thought to have been built around the year one thousand as a defensive building rather than a dwelling, and inside its walls stood the church. Of that castle nothing is left, and the only portrait we have of it is a seventeenth-century ex voto painted inside that very church, in which one Paolo Agostino Griffi had the burning of the castle and the apparition of the Virgin depicted, with the words «Questa opera fatta per satisfare uno voto di Paolo Agostino Griffi»: the only image of the castle is the image of the castle on fire. Until the early twentieth century, to the right of the church's main door, a big key also hung from an iron eyelet, the last relic of the manor, and now it is lost. Then there is the legend: a peasant of Losine, working the ground near the knoll, lost his tool and heard it fall straight down, striking against stones. In 1993 a tunnel was found, a metre and a half high and ninety centimetres wide, which left the Castello locality and descended into a well in the direction of the Griffi house, down in the village.
The church that fresco is in is Santa Maria in Castello, a typical example of a castrense church, that is one built inside a castle, and it goes back to the year one thousand: it has a semicircular Romanesque apse, three narrow windows that light it and a Romanesque bell tower resting on the trabeation of the apse. Inside there is a Pantocrator among the symbols of the Evangelists whose expressive force recalls the art of Michelino da Besozzo. The old parish church of San Maurizio was enlarged in the seventeen hundreds on the vestiges of a twelfth-century chapel, which in its turn stood on the foundations of a pagan temple. The new one, the Sacro Cuore, was built between 1884 and 1904 to a design by Fortunato Canevali. The village lies at the foot of the Concarena, on the Oglio: there were many limestone quarries and a few veins of the marble they call occhialino. And in the Val Camonica every community has its scütüm, its nickname: the people of Losine are the Màrtor, the martens. In 1365 the bishop of Brescia invested the Federici of Mù with the tithes of Losine and of eight other territories.
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📅 Every year, on 22 September
On 22 September Losine celebrates Saint Maurice the Martyr; between late September and early October the village also holds the "Sciör del Tórcol", the Val Camonica wine festival.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Losine, but an easy day trip away.
