Saint Catherine of the Rock

Interesting facts

In the early 1600s five huge boulders crashed through the vault of the chapel holding Besozzi's tomb and stayed wedged in the roof for three centuries.

The boulders finally dropped to the floor without further damage on the night of 11–12 May 1910, and were removed only during restoration in 1983.

The skeleton visible in Besozzi's glass case is actually a wooden statue; his real remains lie in an urn hidden inside the cushion.

The small shrine where Besozzi's relics rest was built to match the dimensions of Saint Catherine's tomb on Mount Sinai.

The church of Santa Maria Nova, begun in 1270, was raised as a thank-offering for deliverance from a pack of wolves that kept raiding local livestock.

The three originally separate churches on the ledge were joined into a single building only in the 16th century.

A portico of the monastery preserves fragments of a frescoed Dance of Death, the medieval image of skeletons leading the living away.

The church holds a Neapolitan organ built by Domenico Antonio Rossi in 1783.

The monastery stood in for Fra Cristoforo's convent in the 1989 television adaptation of Manzoni's novel The Betrothed.

Why it is worth it

The story begins with a shipwreck. Alberto Besozzi, a merchant and moneylender from nearby Arolo, was caught in a storm on Lake Maggiore around 1170 and survived by washing up on the rocks below where the hermitage now stands. He kept the vow he made mid-storm, building a chapel to Saint Catherine of Alexandria and spending the rest of his life there as a hermit — the small chapel he raised still survives, absorbed into the later church.

What had been one man's cave grew into an organised religious site over the following two centuries. It is documented as a hermitage by 1301 and gained formal canonical status in 1334; through the thirteenth century it housed Augustinian hermits, then Ambrosian Hermits from 1379, then Carmelites from 1649. Enlightenment-era suppressions in Lombardy finally emptied it — the last six brothers left in 1770 — and the buildings that survive, clinging to the cliff face in Romanesque style, date largely from that first monastic phase in the late 1200s and early 1300s.

The Italian state made it a national monument in 1914, and since 1970 the Province of Varese has managed the site, which today draws around 70,000 visitors a year — one of the most visited points on this stretch of Lake Maggiore.

Good to know

Italian national monument; around 70,000 visitors a year.

Getting there

6 km from Verbania. Milan Malpensa International Airport (MXP) is about 29 km away.

Saint Catherine of the Rock

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Good to know

Getting there

Plan your visit

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