The Hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso, clinging to the void above the lake

There are places you cannot grasp from the road, only when you come upon them from above, from the north, and see the building glued to a wall of stone that plunges toward the water. The Hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso, on the Lombard shore of Lake Maggiore in the municipality of Leggiuno, is one of them. A ribbon of walls, bell towers and loggias suspended between the rock and the emptiness, where the lake seems to begin right beneath your feet.

The legend tells of a merchant, Alberto Besozzi, who, according to tradition, survived a shipwreck around 1170 and vowed to Saint Catherine that he would withdraw to pray in a cave on this cliff. From that solitary gesture grew, over the following centuries, a monastic complex inhabited by religious communities, among them Augustinian and later Carmelite monks. Declared a national monument in 1914, the hermitage was long forgotten before major twentieth-century restorations.

What remains is a rare ensemble: churches and chapels chasing one another along the precipice, frescoes worn by time, a loggia from which the gaze runs out toward the mountains of the far shore. It is not large, nor monumental in the booming sense of the word. It is the opposite: measured, intimate, made for those willing to slow down.

While the jewels of Lake Maggiore, from the Borromean Islands to Stresa, fill up with tour buses, here the very approach filters out the crowds. You descend on foot down a long stairway cutting through the woods, or arrive by boat from the lake, or else take the lift carved into the rock. Each route demands a small effort, and it is precisely this that lets the hermitage keep its suspended air.

The advice is to come off-season, on a midweek morning, when the loggia is nearly empty and the only sound is the water. Bring comfortable shoes, respect the silence of the sacred spaces, and leave the place as you found it. That is how a fragile place stays alive.

Related guides: Unusual Lombardy: hidden villages and little-known places far from Milan.

Getting there

The Hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso is in Leggiuno, on the Lombard shore of Lake Maggiore. By car you reach the car park from the provincial road running along the lake, and from there you descend to the hermitage on foot down a stairway or by a lift; those coming from Milan use the A8 and A26 motorways. Alternatively you arrive by lake on the passenger boats, for example from Stresa, Arona or Laveno, avoiding the stairway. The reference airport is Milan-Malpensa.

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