Chiesa di Sant'Agostino

The Chiesa di Sant'Agostino, a Catholic church dedicated to Saint Augustine, is Como's only example of Gothic Cistercian architecture. Augustinian monks from the convent of San Tommaso in Civiglio built it in the fourteenth century. The land came from the family of Pietro Pioppi, buried in the church in 1393. Consecrated between 1379 and 1384, it ranks third among the city's mendicant churches, after San Francesco and San Giovanni in Pedemonte.

Three pinnacles and polychrome pilasters on the façade signal the three-nave layout within. A fifteenth-century stone portal carved with flowers sits beneath a nineteenth-century wooden rose window. Fragments of a fresco above the portal show the Madonna and Child with four saints, attributed to Andrea De Passeri. Inside, three naves end in flat apses with ribs and pointed arches. A restoration in the 1960s reversed the neoclassical remodelling that followed the monastery's suppression in 1772. The same campaign recovered the original wooden trusses and frescoes of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Six family chapels line the left nave, decorated in Renaissance and Baroque styles. The second, dedicated to the Madonna della Cintura, holds a Birth of Mary painted by Morazzone in 1612. The right side carries a Madonna with Saints by Simone Peterzano. Eight further panels show local blessed and saints, the work of the Recchi brothers.

South of the church, two sixteenth-century cloisters survive in fragments: seven bays of the outer one, three sides of the inner. You can still make out traces of De Passeri's work on their walls. One fresco shows the Christ child holding a little sparrow, the painter's telltale sign. In the old refectory hangs a Last Supper of Saint Augustine with twelve of his monk saints, painted in 1620. An earthquake in 1876 forced it off its original wall.