Gravedona ed Uniti

This guide to Santa Maria del Tiglio in Gravedona ed Uniti, on Lake Como, follows the maestri comacini, a licensed guild of masons, carpenters and painters freed by a Lombard king's law in the year six hundred forty-three to travel town to town under their own rules. It traces how one of their teams reached this shore in the later eleven hundreds and built their striped church over and around a much older fifth-century baptistery rather than clearing it away. The banded walls and the tower above them are a course-by-course record of that labor, hand-cut stone by builders whose names were never recorded, only their guild's. Look closely at the stripes: each band is a separate cut block, not paint or veneer.