The Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy

In the climate of the Counter-Reformation that followed the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo and the bishops of neighboring dioceses who followed his lead favoured the construction of a series of Sacri Monti, located north-west of the Alps and Pre-Alps. These sites did not try to be a faithful reconstruction, even from the topographical point of view, of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, instead they proposed to provide a faithful representation of the narrative of the life of Christ and the saints, immersed in an environment full of natural forests, lakes and beautiful landscapes. Often there was already an existing shrine or a story and a tradition related to a cult, sometimes even dating back to pagan rituals. At the end of the sixteenth century the Sacri Monti of Crea and Orta arose, in the early seventeenth century the one in Varese was born, while the structures of Belmonte, Domodossola, Ghiffa, Oropa and Ossuccio go back to the decades that followed. On the list of  UNESCO’s World Heritage sites since 2003 the nine Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy hold notable examples of Baroque art, frescoes, statues and architectural complexes in their chapels that also reflect the sensibility and particular religious devotion that marked Mediterranean Europe in the seventeenth century. Through images, art was in fact used as a pedagogical tool, able to teach, and at the same time to emotionally involve the faithful in an area that was also in close contact with the regions of Europe where the Protestant Reformation had taken root. Dedicated not only to Christ and to the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Saints, but also to the Rosary and to the Trinity, a part of these Sacri Monti was part of the territory of the Duchy of Milan, ruled by the Habsburgs of Spain in the Early Modern age. (photo: Sacro Monte of Domodossola)

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