The church of S. Stefano is located in Garlate, a pretty medieval village overlooking a branch of the lake of Lecco. The building, that today we can see on the top, testifies by itself, with the surviving Romanesque structures, the baroque chapels and the nineteenth-century remaking, the vicissitudes of a long and troubled history, but only the excavations carried out under the floor of the present church have allowed us to know a much more ancient past that before was only possible to hypothesize. In fact, many clues, such as the discovery in the nineteenth century of some late antique reliquaries under the altar and the presence of erratic architectural elements, also referable to a building of the early Christian period, suggested the antiquity of Christian worship in that place, even if there was no certainty that the church of St. Stephen should be considered the heir of that long history.
In fact, until the end of the 16th century, two other churches stood near the present building, the collegiate church of S. Agnese and the oratory of S. Vincenzo, both of which were considered irrecoverable due to their age and condemned to demolition on the initiative of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, who made a pastoral visit to the area in 1565. It was precisely on this occasion that the ancient reliquaries, including a precious embossed silver reliquary dating back to the 4th century, were removed from the altar of the church of S. Agnese and moved to the parish church of S. Stefano, from that moment on the only religious building left in the town.
