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Excluding legendary episodes or those that did not leave any historically appreciable effects, the presence of Christianity in the city of Como can be dated back to the 4th century , therefore after the liberalisation of the Christian cult desired - for political purposes - by the emperor Constantine ( 313 ), and probably also after Theodosius I had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire ( Edict of Thessalonica , 380 ).
One thing is certain: the members of the early Christian church built their places of worship outside the city proper, that Novum Comum which - already four centuries earlier - Julius Caesar had populated with five thousand Roman colonists and which was delimited and defended by its city walls. Certainly the first temples of the Christians of Como, and probably also some of their residential settlements, arose in the strip of land that surrounded the city walls for a radius of about "a thousand paces " ( mille passus , one mile ) - legally acting as a buffer between the city and the rest of the territory - and which was crossed by the Via Regina , the ancient road that connected the Como valley with Milan to the south and with Germania Magna to the north.
The first bishop of that local church , Felice , who arrived from Milan towards the end of the 4th century, chose as the base of his apostolate not the walled city, but the suburban village of Zezio , an area, moreover, that had already been dotted with non-Christian sanctuaries for centuries. At the foot of the Baradello hill , Felice built a first place of Christian worship, where - at least according to tradition - there stood a temple in honour of Mercury and where he himself was later buried: the first cathedral of Como, therefore, was that basilica which was later dedicated to Saint Carpophorus .
Bishop Amanzio , second successor of Felix from about the year 420 , had a new basilica built , dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul (on whose area, in the 11th century , the Benedictines would later build the current basilica of Sant'Abbondio ). [1] Here Amanzio moved his seat and here he was buried, as were Abbondio and several of their successors. The transfer of the cathedral from the basilica on the slopes of Baradello to the new basilica of Saints Peter and Paul (although still within the suburban area) must be attributed to the fact that the first seat was too inconvenient for the new needs of worship, needs that in the space of over sixty years had in all probability grown, despite the serious difficulties that the new religion encountered especially from the optimates and the upper classes of the city, whose conversion is attributed above all to the work of Bishop Abbondio.
It was probably with Abbondio that the Christian cult officially entered the walled city, in the forum of which the first intramural baptistery was erected, San Giovanni in Atrio , already considered the official baptistery of the bishop even if the cathedral remained the suburban basilica of Saints Peter and Paul: the bishop's seat, in fact, was maintained, for several more centuries, in the suburban pago of Zezio. The little church of San Michele (today the chapel of the bishop's palace ), on the other hand, was probably an Arian baptistery , particularly active after the occupation of the city by the Lombards ( 589 ), who had created one of the first settlements for themselves and their horses in the area of ​​the current bishop's palace. [2] It is obvious, however, that in addition to those first baptisteries, other churches later arose in the walled city, including the church of Sant'Eufemia , which tradition says was built in the area of ​​the forum and the ancient temple of Jupiter, and to which the seat of the cathedral was transferred during the Early Middle Ages .
At the beginning of the 11th century (before 1015 , perhaps even earlier, in 1006 [3] ), the seat of the cathedral was moved again, from Sant'Eufemia to the Romanesque church of Santa Maria Maggiore, closer to the lake and the port (the bishop of Como had recently acquired feudal rights on the lake shore). We do not know what the structure of this ancient basilica was: it was probably a large temple with five naves , whose southern wall coincided with that of the current cathedral and the apse area with the area of ​​the current transept . [4] Whatever the appearance and size of Santa Maria Maggiore, it is certain that it was part of a complex of religious buildings, which also in