Saint Helena, the pious mother of the Emperor Constantine, was arguably the Holy Land’s first big-name religious tourist. She visited Jerusalem in the fourth century and is said to have returned home with pieces of the True Cross and other souvenirs. But for the average Christian pilgrim a trip to the Holy Land was practically impossible, especially after the region fell under Muslim control. In 1480 the Italian monk Bernardino Caimi came up with a solution: if pilgrims couldn’t visit the Holy Land, why not bring the Holy Land to the pilgrims? The result was the Sacro Monte (Sacred Mountain) of Varallo, a collection of chapels containing life-size dioramas illustrating episodes from the life of Christ.

Varallo must have been wildly successful as a pilgrim magnet because it inspired other sacred mountains all over northern Italy. In the mid-1700s the humble village of Cerveno, located in the Alpine valley of Valcamonica (where the Pezzoni family is from), decided to get in on the act. A sloping gallery lined with alcoves was built onto the parish church and the sculptor Beniamino Simoni (1712-87) was hired to fill the alcoves with vividly painted wooden statuary depicting Christ’s last days, the Via Crucis or Way of the Cross.

The thing that is most remarkable about Simoni’s sculptures is their everyday-ness. Christ is conventionally portrayed and Pilate is garbed like an Ottoman potentate, but the extras who throng the scenes, dressed in their workaday leather breeches, vests, and caps, look like central casting herded them in from the village streets of three hundred years ago. There’s a tradition that Simoni caricatured the local men as a way to shame them into going to church, and most of them are swinish or malicious or dull-witted according to their roles in the drama. Simoni was much kinder with the women, who sorrow fetchingly. Just as impressive is the trompe l’oeil painting of the alcove backdrops and the gallery walls and ceiling, complete with baroque encrustations and even a false window with bull’s-eye glass panes.

I was fortunate to see Simoni’s sculptures in August 2017 and only regret that the tour I was on had to hustle us through. Definitely check out Simoni on the internet. There’s also a short video about the recent restoration of the sculptures, Il Nuovo Sguardo (New Look). It’s in Italian but the imagery gets the point across.

Christ appears before Pilate in the Cerveno Way of the Cross