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Castiglione Olona (Varese, Italy): Church of the Virgin in the Countryside
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 The church is located on the road from Castiglione to Venegono Superiore and was originally located outside the town, in the middle of cultivated fields.
Its construction began in 1566, according to a project that respected the dictates of the counter-reformation of San Carlo. The works proceeded very slowly, so much so that it was completed only in 1646, after the Archbishop of Milan Cardinal Cesare Monti had requested the immediate resumption of the works.
In 1724, the church was then restored by the inhabitants of the hamlet in honor of San Nicola da Tolentino.
The building has a rectangular plan with a single hall, with a quadrangular choir and two side chapels. The structure is made of exposed bricks mixed with river pebbles. The façade is simple and incomplete, with a gabled profile and punctuated by pilasters. In the upper half there is a large serliana in the center and a sundial immediately to the right of it. The bell tower is grafted onto the body of the church at the rear right corner.
The interior has a single room. The walls are punctuated by pilasters and the nave vault has a barrel vault with lunettes. At the center of the vaults of the three spans are reliefs depicting the symbols of the passion. Next to the entrance arch of the presbytery there is a valuable hanging organ, from the second mid-eighteenth century and the work of Giovanni Battista Biroldi from Varese.
There are two side chapels, of the same structure, i.e. rectangular plan and barrel vault. The chapel on the left is dedicated to San Nicola da Tolentino. The altar is made of marble, with a neoclassical style retable with a large niche in the center inside which there is a statue of the saint.
The chapel on the right is instead dedicated to the Madonna of the Belt. At the center of the altar with very essential lines there is a niche with a statue of the Madonna inside. The walls and vault of the chapel are decorated with a cycle of seventeenth-century frescoes dedicated to Saint Francis. They were only rediscovered in 2017.
The presbytery is delimited by a balustrade in polychrome marble with a wrought and painted iron gate. Inside there is the baroque high altar in Verona marble. Both the balustrade and the altar are from the eighteenth century.
On the back wall protected by a carved and gilded wooden canopy, a large trompe l'oeil retable with an architectural structure frames a fresco which stands out for its lively colors and represents a Nativity with knight in armour, referable to the style of the Morazzone school (Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli, 1573/1626).
In front of the church, inside the churchyard, there is the fifteenth-century Oratory of S.Maria Rosa. It is made up of a small square hall and a front portico which approximately doubles its size. Also in this case the masonry is made of exposed bricks and river pebbles. Frescoes from the fifteenth century are still clearly recognizable on both the entrance wall and the back wall. In particular, on the back wall, the Madonna della Misericordia is depicted in the center of a sumptuous trompe l'oeil altarpiece with an architectural structure.
Categories: Places of historical value of artistic value
Via Celestino Papa, 3, 21043 Castiglione Olona VA |
Further pictures of Church of the Virgin in the Countryside in the section Photography |