The church of San Michele in Insula stands outside the built-up area of Trino, on a spot that still keeps the name Insula because it was ringed by two branches of the Po. The origins of the pieve go back to the early Middle Ages: the first written records are of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but it is reasonable to think it was built over an earlier sacred building, since the site was already inhabited in Roman times and protected by a wall, as archaeological digs have shown.
What to see
Despite many later interventions, the church has kept the sober Romanesque manner it took on in the twelfth century. The front is the exception: the porch with columns before the entrance door is an eighteenth-century remaking, and you spot it at once because it is plastered while the flank stays in bare brick, with the decorative band high on the wall of the nave. Inside there are three naves, the central one raised above the side ones. In the presbytery, fragments of twelfth-century frescoes of great importance have been brought back to light: a Crucifixion and some scenes from the life of Saint Michael, painted by an artist abreast of the Romanesque painting then taking hold in Lombardy.
Visiting
The church lost its standing when the settlement gathered around the parish church of San Bartolomeo, built in the thirteenth century inside the town. It was not wholly abandoned, though: it stayed dear to popular devotion, and that saved it. This is why it is still standing today and still keeps its frescoes, while the country pieves that nobody went to any more have almost all vanished from the plain.
Our editors' tip
The name is the most interesting thing about it: Insula. The Po ran here in two branches and made an island, and the pieve was set on it because the spot was defensible and already walled by the Romans. Today the river is elsewhere, the branches are gone, and the church stands among the fields with a few poplars around it: you have to look at it knowing that the landscape which made sense of it no longer exists. Go in the afternoon light, when the sun catches the brick flank, and step inside if it is open: the frescoes in the presbytery are the reason for the trip.