The church of San Lorenzo, the archpriest and parish church of Mandello del Lario, stands on a square a few steps from the lake, at the entrance to the old village: for centuries it was the seat of the pieve of Mandello.
History
Its earliest history is uncertain, because no documents on its foundation survive. Scholars, helped by archaeological surveys with ground-penetrating radar in the early 1990s, suggest an early Christian church built against the wall that the Romans had raised to defend the castrum of Mandello. In the twelfth century the building was turned into a Romanesque temple with three apsed naves, with a bell tower made from one of the towers of the castrum’s walls.
The present building dates from the seventeenth century: the works were carried out between 1613 and about 1670 as an enlargement of the medieval church. The bishop of Como consecrated it on 13 June 1613, as an inscription of 1758 in the presbytery records, and in 1687 work began on the chapel of the dead outside. Of the portals, the south one is of 1710 and the north one of 1765. The tourism site of Mandello also notes that the complex of the Benedictine abbey, already in existence in 833, is attached to the church.
What to see
The bell tower is clearly Romanesque in character and its lower part is the only visible part of the medieval church: it has a row of three blind arches, two rows of mullioned windows with small columns, the belfry with a pointed roof and, at the top, a fourteenth-century cross. In front of the church stands the old chapel of the dead, with an octagonal plan.
The interior has a single nave with a barrel vault and four side chapels. The Stories of Saint Lawrence, in the three large panels of the presbytery and on the inner facade, are by the Milanese painter Agostino Santagostino and were painted between the end of the seventeenth century and the first years of the eighteenth; the stucco work of the inner facade is by Giacomo Scotti (1688). The vault frescoes, with a Calming of the Storm and an Assumption among Saints, are by Luigi Tagliaferri (1916). Among the Baroque works are the carved ciborium, the altar with a polychrome wooden canopy and a Serassi organ with a carved and gilded wooden case.
On the north side opens the chapel of Santa Marta, built towards the end of the sixteenth century by the confraternity of the Disciplini of Valcamonica and thought to have been a medieval baptistery. The church also keeps two seventeenth-century canvases and the small panels dedicated to Our Lady of Graces that come from the sanctuary of Debbio.
Practical information
The church is at piazza Giovanni XXIII 12, in Mandello del Lario, and is accessible to people with disabilities, according to Mandello’s official tourism site. We did not find opening hours on an up-to-date official source: to visit, it is best to ask the parish.
