Biasca

The town Biasca sits in the Leventina valley at the confluence of the Ticino and Brenno rivers. In 1512, a rock slide off Monte Crenone crashed down upon Biasca, completely destroying parts of the town and damming the Brenno. A year later, the dam broke, and the flood waters coursed down the valley, wiping out farmland and bridges all the way south to Bellinzona.

One architectural survivor of that catastrophic time was Biasca's Romanesque church Santi Pietro e Paolo. The building, constructed at the tail end of the 11th century, has undergone a few architectural and decorative changes over the past 900 years, but a thorough restoration between 1955-67 de-Baroqued the interior, restricting the cherubs and gilded curlicues to the side-chapel to the right of the entrance.

Frescoes abound in the church, documenting changes in artistic styles from the 12th through the 17th centuries as well as the shift from anonymous farmer artists to known studios. The cumulative effect of the contrasting styles in the apse is rather, um, striking, with hardly any space left untouched. There are bucolic Renaissance landscapes on the wall, and black and white rectangles and symbolic animals--lion, snake, chicken, blacksmith--on the ceiling. Christ Pantocrator, painted in rich solid colors, smiles serenely from above, surrounded by a mandorla of pink and green circles, while portraits of individual saints adorn the archway.