Cattedrale di San Pietro (Duomo di Faenza)

Faenza's cathedral, begun in 1474 to a design by Giuliano da Maiano, retains an unfinished brick facade and a Renaissance interior with the arcas of its patron saints and the tomb of St Peter Damian.

Why it matters

The Duomo is an ambitious example of Tuscan Renaissance architecture in Romagna. The Manfredi lords brought in the Florentine architect Giuliano da Maiano, whose design follows models associated with Brunelleschi. Because the facade never received its planned facing, the building's proportions, light and structure remain legible alongside later decoration. Local chroniclers compared it with Rimini's Tempio Malatestiano as a major Renaissance commission in the region.

What to notice

• The unfinished brick façade: the protruding teeth of raw masonry mark where a stone cladding was destined to sit, and the white limestone base you see today was added later, after Giuliano had left the site.
• The arcas — carved marble tombs — of San Savino, Sant'Emiliano and San Terenzio, the city's early bishops, associated with Benedetto da Maiano and anonymous Tuscan Renaissance masters.
• The late fifteenth-century wooden crucifix near the entrance, attributed to an unidentified northern European, possibly German, sculptor — a twin of which hangs in San Domenico.
• The Bonaccorsi altarpiece, a sixteenth-century panel by Innocenzo Francucci da Imola that has kept its original gilded carved frame.
• The chapel of St Peter Damian on the left side, where the eleventh-century Faentine doctor of the church is buried.
• The controlled interior light: the original design admitted more daylight through side openings, later blocked when altars and panels filled the aisle chapels.

Context and history

Work began in 1474 on the site of the earlier cathedral, whose only visible survivors are reused stone elements in the outer side walls. The construction site ran long and troubled, lasting until 1520, and the building was consecrated to St Peter only in 1581. Giuliano da Maiano's project was reinterpreted in execution with "Padan" working methods by local craftsmen, which explains the slight provincial inflection in a design that is otherwise Florentine to its bones.

The marble tombs of the patron saints predate the present building's completion and were translated here from the earlier cathedral; San Savino's relics were formally deposited in his arca in the late fifteenth century. Pope Pius XII raised the church to minor-basilica rank in October 1948. The cathedral remains the mother church of the Diocese of Faenza-Modigliana, and the diocesan museum next door grew from the same ecclesiastical heart.