The fascination of the discovered frescos
The church of San Pietro [St. Peter’s], built in the 11th century, is just a few yards from the centre of Teglio. It has Romanesque architecture in the style of Como and the Ticino, consisting of square blocks of stone and river pebble stones set in mortar. The single aisle terminates in an apse of pilaster strips and Lombard bands, while the bell tower is characterised by three orders of two-arched mullioned windows. In 1537 the church came into the possession of the Protestants, who cancelled out all the pictorial decorations with mortar and plaster for reasons of worship, and these were only rediscovered and restored in the 1980s. The interior, although very bare, in fact conserves, in the apsidal bowl, late fourteenth-century frescos in which the figure of the Christ Pantocrator dominates, surrounded by the symbols of the evangelists and the figures of the apostles. Frescoed scenes, unfortunately damaged and not easy to interpret, are also present on one wall of the aisle.
Read more The area surrounding the church is of great archaeological interest. The excavation campaigns conducted in past decades have revealed stratifications dating back to very different eras, from prehistory to the Roman period, from the Middle Ages to more recent centuries. Archaeologists have recovered a stretch of road and numerous coins from the Roman Age, but also remains of houses and a burial site referable to the medieval period, in the lawn space in front of the church. The bell tower also presents traces of a mysterious past. Some stones, in fact, bear engravings of a presumed tree of life and probably Christograms, a reference to the Christian faith.
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