A cliff above Lake Maggiore's eastern shore holds this small hermitage, founded around 1170 after a merchant named Alberto Besozzi prayed to Saint Catherine of Alexandria and survived a shipwreck below, then stayed on as a hermit on the rock where he came ashore.
Dominicans held it first, then Franciscans from Milan for three centuries, then Carmelites, then Benedictine monks who ran it until 2018; a Franciscan fraternity has cared for the site since 2019. Its strangest chapter came in the early 1700s, when boulders shaken loose above the roof lodged in a chapel vault instead of crushing it, and stayed wedged there for nearly two hundred years before finally being cleared in 1910. Frescoes from the 14th to the 17th century still line the three linked churches, and three ways reach the complex today: a long public stairway, a rock-cut elevator, or the passenger ferries calling at Leggiuno's pier below.
