Descrizione
Here, since the 11th century, a hospice stood where travelers, pilgrims and those who traveled this important road transporting goods from Venice to Germany and vice versa stopped. It is not without significance that the church of Ospitale was dedicated to San Nicolò, venerated in the Alpine area as the protector of travelers. Although in the sixteenth century it was largely rebuilt with the addition of the semi-octagonal apse with a ribbed vault, the church still retains the original thirteenth-century layout with a single nave. The interior, with an exposed trussed roof in the nave, and with a larch floor, is now essential, cozy and very welcoming. During the closures, following the Josephan reforms of 1781 and during the First World War, the church was stripped and sacked with the consequent disappearance of many furnishings. The presence of fragments of faux marble decoration, visible both in the spurs of the small single-lancet windows and in the lower part of the walls of the nave, is an indication of a polychrome wainscot of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that could have accompanied a fresco painting cycle that has now disappeared. On the plastered walls of the nave, numerous ocher brush inscriptions are legible, showing acrostics, monograms, double crosses and late sixteenth-century dating. An important testimony, not only historical but also as a contribution to the history of the art of this Alpine area, are the frescoes on the facade, now detached and placed inside, dating back to the beginning of the fifteenth century. These are three incomplete but still legible panels: "San Cristoforo", "Madonna with Child and San Nicolò", "San Nicolò saves the merchants while they are about to be shipwrecked", "San Nicolò while throwing the dowry to the three poor girls" and " Sant'Antonio Abete ". The cycle is the work of a local painter, active between the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century who, while combining architectural elements with volumetrically treated figures, was unable to create a unitary space. The frescoed "Crucifixion" located in the apse where the church of Ospitale is also represented can be dated to the end of the 16th century. 1572 he took charge of the enlargement of the church. In 1625 the altars were finally consecrated: one dedicated to San Nicolò, which still exists today, and the others, who have disappeared, dedicated to the thaumaturges saints Biagio and Antonio Abate, who became co-patrons of the church. On the only remaining altar there is today a German school altarpiece dating back to the sixteenth century, characterized by the precious decoration and the attention paid to the rendering of the materials.