Chiesa di Santa Maria del Tiglio

This guide to Chiesa di Santa Maria del Tiglio in Lake Como follows a poplar-wood crucifix carved around the mid-eleven hundreds, its maker unrecorded, that hung for centuries in the wrong building next door. It traces the octagonal black-and-white baptistery itself, standing since the eleven hundreds over the ruins of an earlier fifth-century structure, and the restoration that finally moved the crucifix here. Look past it to the counter-facade for the church's other survivor, a worn fourteenth-century Last Judgement fresco crowded with painted bell towers.