Santa Marta is a Roman Catholic church building located in the town of Lecco, region of Lombardy, Italy.
Lecco is a city of 48,131 inhabitants in Lombardy, northern Italy, 50 kilometres (31 mi) north of Milan, the capital of the province of Lecco. It lies at the end of the south-eastern branch of Lake Como. The Bergamo Alps rise to the north and east, cut through by the Valsassina of which Lecco marks the southern end.
Lombardy is one of the twenty administrative regions of Italy, in the northwest of the country, with an area of 23,844 square kilometres (9,206 sq mi). About 10 million people, forming one-sixth of Italy's population, live in Lombardy and about a fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in the region, making it the most populous and richest region in the country and one of the richest regions in Europe. Milan, Lombardy's capital, is the second-largest city and the largest metropolitan area in Italy.
A church at the site was present by the 13th century, originally dedicated to St Calimero. In 1386, it housed the flagellant Confraternity of the Disciplini of St Marta, who added a hospice and rededicated the church. The church has been refurbished over the centuries. The facade dates to the 1720s.
Flagellants are practitioners of an extreme form of mortification of their own flesh by whipping it with various instruments. Most notably, Flagellantism was a 14th-century movement, consisting of radicals in the Catholic Church. It began as a militant pilgrimage and was later condemned by the Catholic Church as heretical. The followers were noted for including public flagellation in their rituals. This was a common practice during the Black Death, or the Great Plague. They did this because they thought harming themselves would make God have pity on them, and that they would not get the disease, and if they already had it they tried to get God to take it back. But, some did it because they thought that it would remove the infected blood from their bodies.
The interior ceiling has a late 17th-century fresco, depicting the Glory of St Martha, by Giovanni Battista and Carlo Pozzo, and the church houses a 17th-century processional statue on the main altar of the Madonna of the Rosary and Child. The altar has 16th century marble sculpture busts of the apostles; the altar was refurbished in 1816 likely by Giuseppe Bovara. The lateral altars have statues of Santa Marta and San Antonio di Padova. [1]
