Sacro Monte di Varese
— — fourteen chapels up a quiet hill.
Not only on a wall.
“A pilgrim path that climbs out of Varese into chestnut woods, marked by fourteen baroque chapels, each one a Mystery of the Rosary, each one a small scene of painted plaster figures behind an iron grate. The road ends at the village of Santa Maria del Monte and a sanctuary that has stood there since the early seventeenth century. The view runs west toward Lake Maggiore.
Sacro Monte di Varese, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Sacro Monte di Varese is a devotional route on the hillside above the city of Varese in northern Lombardy, about sixty kilometres northwest of Milan. The path climbs roughly two kilometres from the village of Sant'Ambrogio Olona to the medieval sanctuary of Santa Maria del Monte at 880 metres. It is one of the nine Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy designated together as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003. The Sacri Monti are devotional landscapes built between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bring the holy places of pilgrimage into the Alpine foothills.
The fourteen chapels were designed beginning in 1604 by the Capuchin friar Giovanni Battista Aguggiari and the architect Giuseppe Bernascone, and built through the seventeenth century with the support of regional families and Cardinal Federico Borromeo of Milan. Each chapel houses painted plaster figures by Lombard sculptors and frescoed walls by painters including Il Morazzone and Francesco Silva. The figures are arranged behind iron grates so that pilgrims pause at each station and read the scene before continuing up the cobbled path to the sanctuary.
The path is open without an admission fee and can be walked in around an hour each way; a small funicular runs from the lower station to the village at Santa Maria del Monte for those who prefer not to climb. The sanctuary at the top holds a Byzantine icon of the Virgin venerated since the medieval period and remains an active parish. Late spring through October gives the best weather; chestnut leaves fall through November, and snow is possible on the upper path in deep winter.