[image ALT: Much of my site will be useless to you if you've got the images turned off!]

A chapel near Torre del Colle (PG)

[image ALT: It is the front of an unidentified rural chapel near Torre del Colle, Umbria (central Italy).]

[image ALT: A painted wooden door, just large enough for one person. It has two leaves, each decorated at about 1 meter off the ground with a cut-out motif in the shape of a lobate cross. The door is secured by a padlocked chain passed thru those cut-outs, and calf-high weeds are growing in front of it. It is the door of an unidentified rural chapel near Torre del Colle, Umbria (central Italy).]

The most useful thing I can say about this Umbrian chapel, I've already said — to my new friends as we toured the back-country around Bevagna: "Stop the car; that's a church." Someone had to holler, after all; cars have a momentum of their own and tend to possess their drivers!

I could easily have been wrong — but in this case I wasn't. What else would this one-room building be, out in the country by itself, with a bell over its cross-decorated door? Peering in, the eye registered better than the camera could record: a bit of an altar; it's a church.

Now central Italy, after centuries of travelers, to say nothing of generations of local experts proud of their heritage, has come to be very well documented: somewhere out there a book will probably tell you what saint is honored here, and when the chapel was built, and maybe even by whom and why; but I know nothing about it except what I see: to judge from the characteristic oeil-de‑boeuf shape of the window, this is the work of the 17c to the 19c.

Update, 2023: Google Maps has got better over the years, and now includes extensive crowd-sourcing. That in turn allowed Carlo Cecchetti to identify the church and post three photos of it: he identifies it as the Madonna della Neve (a common dedication: in Umbria alone there are at least a dozen churches by that name), and locates it on via Piscinale in the comune of Bevagna; but I still have not succeeded in finding any further information about the little building.

Quindi, se sei della zona e/o hai delle informazioni su questa chiesetta, scrivimi per favore!

[image ALT: The back of a rectangular building, roughly 2 meters wide and 3 meters long; it is built of irregular mortared stone masonry, and about half its plaster coat has spalled off. It is a rear view of an unidentified rural chapel near Torre del Colle, Umbria (central Italy).]

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