This Romanesque church was baroque for two and a half centuries. Built between the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the masters from the Como region, it was transformed inside and out when in 1657 it became a provostal parish; only at the beginning of the twentieth century did a restoration give it back the medieval look it has now.
What to see
The front has a cornice of blind arches at the top, oculi and single-light windows above the single doorway; there are three apses, and two of them were rebuilt during the restoration. Inside, the plan is of three aisles on columns, following the scheme the Como builders repeated all over the lake region.
The church was declared a national monument in 1904, and it was in those years that it was decided to remove the seventeenth and eighteenth-century altars and decoration to bring the building back to its original state. It was a choice of taste, not a technical necessity, and it was made across half of Italy in the same decades.
Visiting
The basilica is in piazza della Chiesa, in the upper part of Bellagio, five minutes uphill from the landing stage; free entry with hours tied to services. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the apses and find the point where the masonry changes: two of them are twentieth-century reconstructions. A good part of the Romanesque we admire in Italy was brought back to light, or remade, between the end of the nineteenth century and the nineteen-thirties, when it was decided that the middle ages should look a certain way. Knowing it takes nothing away, but it changes what you are looking at.