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High above Lake Como in Lombardy, overlooking the cathedral city of Como and the southwestern branch of the lake, looms the tiny village of Brunate. It is a picturesque spot, beloved of mountain climbers, which enjoyed a brief heyday as a tourist mecca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An efficient if ear-popping funicular railway, inaugurated in 1894, now scales the steep cliff in a brisk seven minutes. But in the Middle Ages, when most of our story is set, Brunate was as remote and inaccessible a site as one could hope to find. A hagiographer around 1600 described it as an "ignoble village on that mountain whose vast ridge towers above the city to the east. . . . The mountain is arduous and laborious to climb."2 In 1578 the village had a mere 156 inhabitants, and as late as 1900 its year-round population was barely over 500.3
From the top of the funicular line, a stairway leads up to the baroque church of San Andrea, whose cheerful pink façade opens onto the village's main piazza (Figure 1). Inside is a crystal reliquary holding the bones of Brunate's own beata, the Augustinian abbess Maddalena Albrizzi (d. 1465), beatified in 1907. An unremarkable modern painting represents Albrizzi in a nun's habit, holding a crucifix. On the north wall of the church is another painting in an elaborate marble frame (Figure 2)-this one a fresco from circa 1450, older than the surviving fabric of the church itself. Around 1745, in the course of renovations, the fresco was cut out of the wall that had supported it, framed at considerable expense, and moved to its present, awkward location on the pier of an arch.4 The dominant figure is another local favorite, St. Guglielma, whose unofficial feast is celebrated each year on the fourth Sunday of April.5 Her feast is "unofficial" because, unlike Maddalena Albrizzi, St. Guglielma does not appear in the Ada Sanctorum or even the local martyrology, nor is she honored anywhere but in the village of Brunate. In view of the romance that constitutes her legend, one might wonder if she is only a figure of folklore, like Saint Christopher and a hundred others demoted in the reforms after Vatican II.
The truth,...