Sacro Monte of Varallo
Reception and guided tours of Sacro Monte di Varallo with the staff of the Sacred Mounts Management Authority
In August and September 2024, the wooden kiosk of the Reception Office of Sacro Monte di Varallo reopens to the public.
The INFOPOINT, located between Piazza Giovanni Testori, the main entrance to Sacro Monte, and the arrival point of the old pedestrian walkway coming up from Varallo, resumes its activity of welcoming visitors. The staff in charge will thus be able to provide a useful service to the many summer visitors to the Monumental Complex, also in French and English.
During the opening days there are guided tours at 11:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., with free offerings pro-restoration, while during the whole week it is possible to visit the interior of the Chapel of the Crucifixion (no. 33), the most monumental of Sacro Monte di Varallo, with works by Gaudenzio Ferrari (Valduggia c. 1480 - Milan 1546)
Below are the opening times and contact details:
INFOPOINT OPENING HOURS
Monday closed
Tuesday closed
Wednesday 15:00 - 19:00
Thursday 10:00 - 13:00 / 15:00 - 19:00
Friday 10:00 - 13:00 / 15:00 - 19:00
Saturday 10:00 - 13:00 / 15:00 - 19:00
Sunday 10:00 - 13:00 / 15:00 - 19:00
For info
tel. +39 347 579 1562 - tel. +39 344 348 1148
On the rocky spur overlooking the town of Varallo, at the end of the fifteenth century the Franciscan friar Bernardino Caimi designed a small Holy Land. He built simple, rural edifices, meant to re-create the main landmarks of Jerusalem linked to the life of Christ and to evoke the events occured in those places, with images, paintings or statues made since 1486.
In the early sixteenth-century, the renown painter and sculptor Gaudenzio Ferrari produced spectacular life-size statues, decorated with colourful clothes, beards and hair, located within the chapels built by Caimi. The extreme realism of these scenes, associated with illusionistic wall-paintings, deeply involved the beholder in the sacred drama and became the model for all the chapels built in the following centuries.
After 1565 the Sacro Monte was expanded and remodelled, following the project of the famous late-Renaissance architect Galeazzo Alessi, who collected his drawings for the Sacro Monte in a book known as 'Libro dei Misteri' (Book of the Misteries of Christ’s life). Even though it was only partially executed, the project by Alessi was the starting point for all subsequent development.
During the Counter-Reformation, thanks to the intervention of the Bishop of Novara Carlo Bascapé and his successors, the Sacro Monte turned in a sort of petrified religious theatre, aiming at illustrating a morally uplifting sacred history, by the means of life-size paintings and statues inspired by the works of Gaudenzio Ferrari. The stunning realism of the scenes transformed the chapels into snapshots of real life, produced by prominent artist and such as Tabacchetti, the Fiammenghini, Morazzone, Tanzio da Varallo, Giovanni d’Enrico, Pier Francesco Gianoli, Dionigi Bussola, Giovanni Battista Bernero and Benedetto Alfieri.
The Sacro Monte is also a park-garden, a great rural Way of the Cross climbing up the hill. At the same time, it has the appearance of an ancient fortified city built on a rocky hill, with walls, monumental gates, two squares - civic and religious -, porticoed palaces and piazzas, inhabited by statues and painted characters. The Sacro Monte is theater, art, architecture, garden and forest.