Locarno: a common lordship and its Protestant community

A lordship of twelve cantons

Locarno became Swiss by conquest. The Rusca family, who had held the town and its territory as a fief from the dukes of Milan, lost their dominion when Confederate troops occupied the Locarnese in 1503. After the battle of Novara in 1513 the Swiss obtained the castle from King Louis XII of France. The Peace of Fribourg of 1516, concluded after the defeat at Marignano, formally assigned the entire Locarnese to the Confederates.¹ The territory was not incorporated into any single canton. It became one of the four “ennetbirgische Vogteien”, the lordships beyond the mountains (Lugano, Mendrisio, Locarno and the Vallemaggia), which were ruled jointly by the twelve cantons that had been members of the Confederation at the time of the conquest. A bailiff (Landvogt, balivo), chosen for two years in rotation by the sovereign cantons, exercised civil and criminal jurisdiction in their name and presented his accounts each year to a syndicate of delegates from the Diet at Baden.²

This constitutional arrangement determined the fate of the Protestants of Locarno. In a common lordship religious questions were decided by the majority of the sovereign cantons, since no single canton could settle them alone. After the Second War of Kappel in 1531, in which Zurich was defeated and Zwingli killed, the Second Peace of Kappel left each canton free to regulate religion within its own territory but permitted the return of Reformed communities in the common lordships to the old faith and protected Catholic minorities there. Among the twelve sovereign cantons of the Italian lordships the Catholic Orte held a majority, which made the Diet at Baden the forum in which the religious future of Locarno would be decided.³

Locarno itself was a town of some consequence. It stood on important trade routes connecting Lombardy with the Swiss and German cities, imported cereals and salt from the south and exported substantial quantities of timber and livestock northward by way of Lake Maggiore.⁴ Its society was dominated by an old nobility, the capitanei, a group of families who had held rights over the town, its fortifications and its surrounding lands since the high Middle Ages. The Orelli, documented in Locarno from the twelfth century and probably descended from the Lombard nobles da Besozzo, controlled fifteen of the twenty-one seats in the council of the pieve of Locarno by 1365. They held the office of podestà of Brissago from 1342 until 1798 and exercised hereditary administrative functions in the Blenio valley.⁵ The Muralto took their name from a castle at Muralto, granted as a fief by the bishop of Como in 1191 or 1192 and destroyed around 1380. They too belonged to the capitanei and held portions of the castles and extensive lands in the region.⁶ The Appiani, another noble lineage of the town, had produced a royal treasurer in Milan, Giovanni Battista Appiani (d. 1540), son-in-law of Ludovico Borromeo, and a tax collector for Locarno in the early sixteenth century.⁷

These families had the wide horizons of Lombard commercial society: Milan, Como, Bergamo and Venice were their natural markets, and several of them combined landed income with trade, medicine or the law. Aloisio Orelli, who would found the Zurich line of the family, bought a pharmacy in Locarno in 1541 and engaged in trade. Among his fellow exiles, Giovanni Muralto was a physician and surgeon, Martino Muralto a lawyer, and Taddeo Duno had studied medicine and the liberal arts at Basel and Pavia.⁸ This combination of social standing, literacy, commercial contacts and a certain amount of movable wealth would matter a great deal once they had to start again north of the Alps.

Giovanni Beccaria and the formation of a Reformed congregation

The Reformation reached Locarno through a schoolmaster. Giovanni Beccaria, born in 1508 or 1511, returned to Locarno in 1535 after partial training for the priesthood in Rome and was appointed in 1536 to head the Latin school at the Franciscan monastery of San Francesco.⁹ Around 1539 he developed an interest in the Bible and in the writings of the Reformers. He maintained contact with the Zurich theologians Konrad Pellikan and Heinrich Bullinger, and under his influence a group of Locarnese began to meet for Bible study and to question the doctrine of the Mass. The community grew to about two hundred members and initially operated in secret for fear of the Inquisition.¹⁰

The congregation drew on several strands of the Locarnese elite. Members of the Muralto family embraced the Reformation after 1535 and joined other local families and exiles from Milan and Piedmont. After Beccaria the leadership of the congregation passed to Taddeo Duno and Martino Muralto.¹¹ Duno, born in 1523 into an ancient noble family of Locarno and originally from Ascona, came under Beccaria’s influence as a young man and went on to study in Basel from 1545 to 1547 and in Pavia in 1547 and 1548, where he took his doctorate.¹² Aloisio Orelli is remembered in the family tradition as a founder of the Protestant community in the town. The religious division ran through the families themselves: while Protestant Muralto went into exile, Galeazzo Muralto remained Catholic and served as archpriest of Locarno from 1528 to 1557.¹³

The early Locarnese Reformation was thus a movement of notables and educated townspeople in which women played a prominent role and which looked towards Zurich from the beginning. Bullinger’s correspondence documents the connection: Taddeo Duno’s first letter to him is dated 9 August 1549, only days after the decisive disputation of that summer.¹⁴ The community’s orientation towards Zurich for theological guidance is significant: it explains why Zurich felt a particular responsibility for the exiles in 1555 and why the exiles themselves chose Zurich as their destination.

The disputation of 1549 and the Diet’s decisions of 1554

Tension with the Catholic clergy grew during the 1540s. In 1547 Beccaria abolished the daily Mass at his school. On 5 August 1549 a formal disputation took place at the castle of the Landvogt, in which Beccaria declared that he would accept the teachings of the Church only in so far as they agreed with the Bible. He was arrested, released under public pressure, and in 1550 left Locarno for the Misox, the Mesolcina valley in the territory of the Grey Leagues.¹⁵ Taddeo Duno took part in the disputation on Beccaria’s side and later recorded its course in his De persequutione adversus Locarnenses, printed in 1602.¹⁶

The years that followed saw a gradual tightening. In 1550 the Diet of Baden reaffirmed the prohibition of Reformed communities in the common lordships of the twelve cantons, whereupon the Locarnese community formally declared itself Catholic while continuing to practise the Reformed faith in private.¹⁷ Duno, practising medicine at Asso near Como, was denounced to the Inquisition in 1551 and returned to Locarno in 1553. The matter was finally settled at two Diets in Baden in July and November 1554, which imposed on the Protestants of Locarno an ultimatum: they were to return to the Catholic faith or leave the territory.¹⁸ According to the account of the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe, 120 persons declared that they would remain faithful to their confession.¹⁹

For Zurich the decision was a political defeat. Through the mediation of Beccaria, the Reformed cities of Bern, Schaffhausen and Zurich had promised to stand by the Locarnesi, yet they could not prevent the verdict of the Diet. Zurich accepted the result and granted the exiles refuge.²⁰ The decision had consequences beyond Switzerland: the expulsion found a wide echo in contemporary European opinion and is reported to have been discussed at the Diet of Augsburg in 1555, the assembly that produced the religious peace of the Empire.²¹

The women of Locarno and the departure of March 1555

In March 1554 all residents of Locarno were required to confess and take communion according to the Catholic rite, while those who publicly professed the Reformed faith were required to recant or face exile. In January 1555 the papal nuncio Ottaviano Riverta (della Rovere), bishop of Terracina, invited Dominican preachers to reconvert the population. After a Dominican sermon on transubstantiation Lucia Bellò, known as a Protestant teacher in the town, requested a scriptural debate with the nuncio and appeared before him with Barbara Muralto, Caterina Appiani, Caterina and Elisabetta Rosalini and Chiara Toma. All of them reaffirmed their convictions. Barbara Muralto, Lucia Bellò and Caterina Appiani were fined fifty crowns each and threatened with the confiscation of their property. After almost two years of negotiations, in which the exiled community and Bullinger intervened, the charge of blasphemy was withdrawn and the fines were reduced.²²

The episode shows two features of the community that would matter in Zurich. Women were among its most determined members, and several of them, as widows or heads of households, would later appear in the Zurich records as independent economic actors. And the community had already learnt how to use its connections: the letters to Bullinger, the intervention of Zurich in the Diet and the long negotiation over the fines were a first exercise in the kind of transalpine advocacy that the exiled merchants would later deploy for their trade.

On 3 March 1555 the Reformed of Locarno left their town. The HLS speaks of more than one hundred Locarnesi who set out for Zurich. The biography of Taddeo Duno in the same work describes him as leaving with about a hundred others through the Mesolcina and over the San Bernardino pass, whereas a recent church account puts the total number of refugees from Locarno at about two hundred.²³ The divergence in the figures reflects the fact that the exiles did not travel as a single group, that some went on to Basel, Bern or the Grisons and that others followed in later months. For Locarno the departure was a lasting loss. It ended the Reformed presence in the town for centuries, since a Reformed community reappeared in the region only in the late nineteenth century. In February 2017 Locarno joined the network of “Reformation Cities of Europe” of the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe, while the Castello Visconteo now houses a permanent exhibition on the history of Protestantism in the Locarnese.²⁴

Notes

1. HLS, Italian edition, Janke and Huber, “Locarno (comune)” (cited above). On the Italian campaigns and Marignano see Part A of this book. ↩
2. HLS, Italian edition, André Holenstein, “Baliaggi comuni”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/009817/. Holenstein describes the common lordships as a fourth political-territorial element of the Old Confederation, alongside the thirteen cantons, the allied territories and the protectorates. ↩
3. Wikipedia (German), “Reformation und Gegenreformation in der Schweiz”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation_und_Gegenreformation_in_der_Schweiz. On the Second Peace of Kappel and its economic consequences for Zurich see Chapter B.I. ↩
4. HLS, Italian edition, Janke and Huber, “Locarno (comune)” (cited above). ↩
5. HLS, Italian edition, Rodolfo Huber and Martin Illi, “Orelli”, version of 3 May 2017, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/020179/2017-05-03/. ↩
6. Wikipedia (English), “Muralto family”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muralto_family, which summarises the HLS family article. ↩
7. HLS, Italian edition, “Appiani”, version of 2 August 2001, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/023486/2001-08-02/. ↩
8. Wikipedia (English), “Aloisio Orelli”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloisio_Orelli, citing H. Schulthess, Die von Orelli von Locarno und Zürich (1941); “Martino Muralto”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martino_Muralto. ↩
9. Wikipedia (German), “Giovanni Beccaria (Reformator)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Beccaria_(Reformator). ↩
10. Community of Protestant Churches in Europe, “Reformation Cities of Europe: Locarno”, https://reformation-cities.org/cities/locarno/. The Roman Inquisition was reorganised by Pope Paul III in 1542. ↩
11. Wikipedia (English), “Barbara Muralto”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Muralto, citing Ferdinand Meyer, Die evangelische Gemeinde in Locarno, ihre Auswanderung nach Zürich und ihre weitern Schicksale (1836), and the Eidgenössische Abschiede. ↩
12. HLS, Italian edition, Pablo Crivelli, “Duno, Taddeo”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/010112/. ↩
13. Wikipedia (English), “Aloisio Orelli” and “Muralto family” (both cited above). ↩
14. Swiss National Museum, blog, “The Protestants of Locarno”, February 2024, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2024/02/the-protestants-of-locarno/. ↩
15. Wikipedia (German), “Giovanni Beccaria (Reformator)” (cited above). ↩
16. HLS, Italian edition, Crivelli, “Duno, Taddeo” (cited above). ↩
17. HLS, Italian edition, Janke and Huber, “Locarno (comune)” (cited above); Wikipedia (English), “Barbara Muralto” (cited above). ↩
18. HLS, Italian edition, Crivelli, “Duno, Taddeo” (cited above). ↩
19. Community of Protestant Churches in Europe, “Reformation Cities of Europe: Locarno” (cited above). ↩
20. Community of Protestant Churches in Europe, “Reformation Cities of Europe: Locarno”, https://reformation-cities.org/cities/locarno/: “Auf Vermittlung Beccarias versprachen die reformierten Städte Bern, Schaffhausen und Zürich, den Locarnesern beizustehen” and “Am 3. März 1555 brach die Hälfte der Bevölkerung Locarnos auf ins Exil, das ihnen in Zürich gewährt wurde.” HLS, Italian edition, “Locarno (comune)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/002108/2022-12-20/: “Nel 1554 la Dieta di Baden impose perciò agli evangelici l’abiura o l’esilio.” The detailed course of the negotiations is documented in the Eidgenössische Abschiede. ↩
21. Community of Protestant Churches in Europe, “Reformation Cities of Europe: Locarno” (cited above). The Swiss National Museum blog (cited above) likewise notes that the expulsion caused considerable comment and a high degree of interconfessional distrust among the Confederates. ↩
22. Wikipedia (English), “Barbara Muralto” (cited above). The spelling of the nuncio’s name varies in the sources between Riverta, Raverta and della Rovere. ↩
23. HLS, Italian edition, Janke and Huber, “Locarno (comune)” (cited above); HLS, Italian edition, Crivelli, “Duno, Taddeo” (cited above); Nathalie Dürmüller, “Migranten von einst: reformierte Tessiner im Zürcher Exil”, ref.ch, 5 October 2016, https://www.ref.ch/news/migranten-von-einst-wie-reformierte-tessiner-im-exil-fuss-fassten/. ↩
24. Città di Locarno, “Locarno Città europea della Riforma”, https://www.locarno.ch/it/locarno-citta-europea-della-riforma. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.