Chiesa di San Francesco
Step through the frescoed lunette portal on Piazza San Francesco and the temperature drops a degree or two — brick walls, a single nave, a wooden roof overhead. The church is spare in the Franciscan way, which makes the large painted crucifix above the altar land all the harder. Scholars still argue over who made it around 1289 — Duccio di Boninsegna, Guido di Graziano, or the Maestro di Badia a Isola — but the uncertainty doesn't diminish it.
The cloister behind the church is the quieter reward. Octagonal columns carry brick arches around a 16th-century well, the Pozzo della Bufala, its stone crown balanced between two travertine columns. Traces of 13th-century fresco cling to the walls.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to time it for late afternoon, when the light works through the cloister arches at a low angle. The Chapel of Sant'Antonio, frescoed by the Nasini brothers in the second half of the 1600s, is easy to overlook on the way to the crucifix — worth slowing down for.
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Book directly at the providerHow Chiesa di San Francesco came to be
The site began as a Benedictine house dedicated to San Fortunato. By 1233 a document records the 'contrada fratrum minorum' — the street of the minor friars — and the Franciscans had taken over. The church was rebuilt in 1231 and consecrated in 1289, the same year its disputed painted crucifix was made.
Centuries of incremental change followed: a Baroque chapel added in the 17th century, granaries built along the left flank under the Lorena in the 18th, and a bell tower rebuilt by architect Lorenzo Porciatti in 1926 after lightning brought down its predecessor. The church was returned to the Franciscans by Bishop Gustavo Matteoni in 1924, and formally erected as a parish in 1949.
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.