The church of Santa Maria is a small Romanesque church in Loppia, a hamlet of Bellagio at the end of the Villa Melzi garden. It stands in the private park of Villa Gerli and is not open to the public, but can be glimpsed from the road.
History
The date of origin is uncertain: for the Bellagio tourist portal and for myLakeComo the building goes back to the last quarter of the 10th century, a hypothesis based on the shape of the windows and apse, the lack of decoration and the material; the regional record speaks of the early 11th century and Wikipedia of the 10th-11th. Wikipedia adds that the bell tower, of the 11th century, was built after the church.
Beside it rose a Benedictine nunnery. For the regional record it was abandoned in the 17th century, for Wikipedia it was already in ruins in the 16th and was suppressed during the Counter-Reformation. At the end of the 18th century the mothers of San Colombano of Como sold their properties to Pietro Venini, owner of Villa Giulia, and the tourist portal dates the passage to the Venini to 1775. His descendants pulled the nunnery down in 1804 to open the avenue that runs from the villa to the lake. According to myLakeComo the property then passed to the Poldi Pezzoli and the Trivulzio, and in 1941 was bought by Count Gerli, who took particular care over the restoration of the church.
What to see
It is a single-nave building with an irregular, trapezoidal plan, ending in a low apse, originally semicircular, opened by three splayed single windows. The side windows are long, double-splayed and at irregular intervals, four to the south and three to the north. The facade is bare: the only accents are the single-block lintel over the portal and a small cross-shaped window, the same as the one at the back. Walls of stones and pebbles. The tourist portal recalls that the nuns put a ceiling over the nave, and Wikipedia today describes a timber roof. A travel blog also speaks of a bell tower crowned with small arches.
Practical information
- The church is private property and cannot be visited; the regional record specifies that its shapes can be glimpsed from the provincial road towards Como.
- Loppia is about fifteen minutes on foot from the centre of Bellagio, along the road. The circular tour of the hamlets, described by myLakeComo, touches it before reaching Villa Melzi.
