Chiesa di San Francesco

The convent church that faces Popoli's market square has been the town's stage for seven centuries. A stone staircase flanked by two worn lions climbs to a late-fifteenth-century facade whose rose window carries the arms of the Cantelmo and Carafa, while inside a chapel keeps an antependium by Raimondo Pompei.

Why it matters

San Francesco preserves several phases of Popoli Terme’s religious and architectural history. Its convent is documented in the town from 1293, and the church itself — attested by 1334 — grew with the medieval borough around the market square. The church is also associated with the town’s devotion to San Bonifacio. The facade brings together two periods: Renaissance sculpture below and a Baroque upper register rebuilt after the 1688 earthquake.

What to notice

Two stone lions on tall pedestals flank the staircase. Worn by age, they still clutch their shields: one bears the rudder device of Count Restaino Cantelmo, the other the arms of the Colonna family, placed there after the houses were joined by marriage in 1527. The portal below is a six-column composition with crocketed capitals and floral carving, modelled on templates from L'Aquila and built by Lombard masters from 1494. Above it, the quadrilobed rose window is a freely imagined piece of late-Quattrocento design: Renaissance moldings and wheel-spoke rays frame the coupled Cantelmo-Carafa coats of arms at its centre. Statues of Saint Francis and Saint Anthony of Padua rest on corbels beside the portal, and the upper, baroque register is crowned by Saint George on horseback transfixing the dragon. Inside, the single nave has side chapels and a shallow transept. Works include a wooden group of the Crucified Christ between the Madonna and Saint John, by an unknown fifteenth-century sculptor, and a frescoed Pietà, tentatively attributed to Paolo da Montereale, in a marble dossale dated 1732.

Context and history

The friars were established on this square by the end of the thirteenth century, and the church quickly became the ceremonial heart of the county. In 1480 Restaino Cantelmo, count from the previous year, raised the tower that now serves as bell tower but began as a watch and defence structure — his stemma and a dated epigraph on the base record it. The lower church was restored in that same phase; after the earthquake of 1688 the upper facade was rebuilt, completed in 1689 in the baroque style you see today. The interior accumulated family patronage: the antependium of the San Francesco chapel, carved in the first half of the eighteenth century by Raimondo Pompei, hangs beside seventeenth-century canvases, a wooden triptych and a frescoed Deposition. Across the square the friars' convent preserves part of its arcated cloister, later reused for civic purposes. Wars and earthquakes have tested the complex, yet the 1293-documentable continuity of the site makes it the anchor of Popoli's religious topography.