Sacro Monte di Varallo

The Sacro Monte di Varallo is a pilgrimage complex designed as a New Jerusalem on a mountainside: 45 chapels climbing a wooded terrace above the town of Varallo Sesia, filled with more than 800 life-size figures in painted terracotta and wood, set against frescoed walls so that each scene of the life of Christ becomes a frozen piece of theatre. It is the oldest of the Sacri Monti of the Alps, and with eight others in Piedmont and Lombardy it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003.

The idea came from the Franciscan friar Bernardino Caimi, who had served as custodian of the holy places in Palestine. With pilgrimage to the Holy Land growing ever harder, he set out to recreate its sites so that those who could not travel might still see Jerusalem. Work began in 1486 with support from wealthy local families and the Duchy of Milan, and by 1491, the year usually given for the foundation, the first chapels, including the Holy Sepulchre, were complete. The complex sits about 600 metres above sea level on the slopes of Monte Tre Croci, some 150 metres above the historic centre of Varallo, where the Sesia leaves the Val Mastallone.

After Caimi's death the decisive figure was the painter, sculptor and architect Gaudenzio Ferrari, a native of Valduggia, who worked here into the late 1520s and created some of the most powerful scenes, among them the Magi in Bethlehem and the Crucifixion, combining crowded sculpted figures with frescoes that continue the action on the walls. From 1565 the architect Galeazzo Alessi redesigned the layout so that pilgrims would follow the chapels in chronological order, through a lower garden zone of scattered pavilions up to a summit laid out as a city, with porticoed palaces around the Piazza dei Tribunali and the Piazza del Tempio, entered through the Golden Gate. Charles Borromeo visited four times, and in the seventeenth century, under Bishop Carlo Bascapè, a new generation took over: the Flemish-born sculptor Jean de Wespin, known as Tabacchetti, the painter Morazzone, and the local brothers Giovanni d'Enrico, a sculptor of startling realism, and Antonio d'Enrico, called Tanzio da Varallo. The Palace of Pilate with its Holy Stairs belongs to this period, and the Basilica of the Assumption, begun in 1614 to designs by Bartolomeo Ravelli and Giovanni d'Enrico, was completed only in 1713. The English writer Samuel Butler was among the first to champion the site's art in the nineteenth century.

Getting there

The Sacro Monte stands directly above Varallo Sesia in the province of Vercelli, in the Valsesia. The nearest larger town is Borgomanero, about 21 km away, and the nearest airport is Milan Malpensa (MXP), about 42 km away.