Borgo Garibaldi’s Disciplina Church to Undergo Major Restoration in 2002
“A mid-November the call for proposals will be issued for the restoration works of the Disciplina church.” The promise comes from the mayor himself, Armando Ferrari, reached in his office at Palazzo Gelmetti. “Our intention,” the mayor explains, “is to return the former religious building, owned by the municipality, to the community by the end of 2002, in its renovated state.”
The municipally owned complex, located in Borgo Garibaldi, is currently in a state of complete and desolate abandonment. The novelty compared to recent times is the approach to renovate the entire complex at once, originally dedicated to S. Maria della Misericordia, later named Disciplina because of its role as the seat of the confraternity of the “disciplinati”.
Therefore, one should not expect an ongoing construction site lasting forever, but rather works completed in a single phase. “Proceeding in this manner,” wrote the designer Arturo Sandrini in his report, “could significantly reduce the timelines from 32/34 months to about 18/20, potentially leading to a greater reduction in costs.”
Costs and Funding
The total cost of the entire operation is expected to amount to 1,147,000,000 lire, with 200 million already received from the Fondazione Cariverona and 100 million set aside by the Municipality long ago. The administration is still actively seeking additional sources of financing and grants.
“The Fondazione Cariverona has promised a second intervention in 2002,” Ferrari specifies. The architect Sandrini‘s goal is to convert the former church into a social and cultural center with an exhibition hall. A multi-purpose prestigious space, which can serve as a large auditorium for conferences and meetings, with seating for about one hundred people, and also as a performance hall.
The project aims at restoring the Disciplina comprehensively: from the roof to the interior nave, including necessary systems updates, as well as the adjoining residential unit and the bell tower. The main access to the architectural complex will be through the arched portal leading into the atrium in front of the church.
This atrium will be covered and fitted with a false ceiling to restore its original function as a welcoming space. The former sacred building, which housed a bakery in the 1980s, is located outside the ancient residential nucleus of Bardolino. Along with the adjacent Romanesque church of San Severo, it represents one of the most interesting architectural structures in the municipality.
This is no coincidence; already in 1910, the Ministry of Public Education declared it a monument, a status reaffirmed on October 30, 1950. “Beyond its apparent formal unity, characterized internally by a rich late baroque decorative apparatus full of stuccoes, the church presents a layered structure revealing its 14th-century origins along with subsequent transformations and enlargements,” Sandrini writes.
“Up to the late 18th-century layout, which still characterizes it today.” Due to the Napoleonic laws abolishing lay confraternities, the chapel was incorporated at the beginning of the 19th century into the royal domain, but was subsequently leased to the confraternity of the Holy Sacrament, which later purchased it.
Looted by Austrian troops in the 19th century, it was stripped of its sacred furnishings, valued at approximately 1,400 lire. In the 19th century, the Disciplina complex was also augmented with a new bell tower erected on the southeast corner of the building, as it appears today.
In 1962, the entire complex was sold by the parish to a private individual. In 1999,