Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista (San Giovannino)

Known locally as San Giovannino, this church in Reggio Emilia combines a sixteenth-century Renaissance rebuilding with an important group of early seventeenth-century paintings. Its unfinished brick façade gives little indication of the richly decorated interior.

Why it matters

A church on the site is documented from the twelfth century; its present form dates to a sixteenth-century rebuilding attributed to Girolamo Casotti. Since 1896, the building has been associated with the city's Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and Saint Francis of Assisi.

What to notice

In the second chapel on the left is a fifteenth-century terracotta Lamentation over the Dead Christ, attributed to Guido Mazzoni; the figure of Christ is a later replacement. Sisto Baldocchio painted the tribune and dome in 1613, while Lorenzo Franchi added scenes of Saint John and the angels of the seven trumpets in 1614. Paolo Guidotti painted the Resurrection in the apse, and Tommaso Sandrini created the illusionistic perspectives on the nave vault. In the presbytery, Alessandro Tiarini's 1624 canvases depict the death and martyrdom of Saint John.

Context and history

The church served as a parish until Napoleon's forces confiscated it in 1808. Merchant Luigi Trivelli then acquired the building, and parts were used as a warehouse and workshop before religious use returned. The façade was never completed; a modern mosaic of Saint Anthony now occupies its niche. The building became associated with the confraternity in 1896.