Sabbio Chiese

At the end of the fifteenth century Venice decided to concentrate the defences of the Valle Sabbia on the Rocca d'Anfo, and all the other fortresses in the valley lost their purpose. The Rocca of Sabbio, standing on a dolomite crag above the bed of the Vrenda and born between the ninth and tenth centuries as an earthwork with palisades, was then turned into a sanctuary: in 1527 it became the church of the Blessed Virgin of the Bell Tower and in 1588, by papal bull, a non-consecrated oratory. You reach it by climbing 107 steps and enter through the military gate, which still has its guard post and its loopholes.

Inside, the structure is double: two churches one above the other, both dedicated to the Annunciation, and in the rock beneath are tunnels and prisons cut when defence was still needed. The altars of the lower church carry polychrome wooden sculptures from the workshop of the Boscaì, the carvers of the Valle Sabbia; a fire in 1958 badly damaged part of them. The municipality has three thousand eight hundred and thirty-one inhabitants in the province of Brescia, halfway between Lake Garda and Lake Idro; its coat of arms was commissioned in 1909 from the painter Giovanni Vernini of Salò for 500 lire.