Chiesa di San Lorenzo

The church of San Lorenzo condenses eight centuries of Bobbio's religious life into a single-aisle hall. First recorded in 1144 and rebuilt by a lay confraternity, it preserves a seventeenth-century wooden choir carried here from the town's Franciscan complex.

Why it matters

The first document attesting the church dates to 1144, when it stood under the control of the monastery of San Colombano, whose garden lay next door. The church remained part of the abbey's precinct until 1950, when a dividing wall came down to create Piazza Santa Fara. In the late thirteenth century its care passed to the lay confraternity of the Battuti, or Disciplinati, and in 1448 it came under the bishop's direct tutelage.

What to notice

• The interior is a single hall with a barrel vault closing in a semicircular apse — an austere, proportioned preaching space.
• The apse contains a seventeenth-century wooden choir, transferred from the nearby Franciscan complex after the Napoleonic suppression of convents in 1803.
• The gabled facade is built of exposed stone, divided into three sections by two orders of Doric pilasters from the seventeenth-century rebuilding.
• On the outside wall, a small slab carved with a cross records that in 1290 a certain Oberto de Segnorino, probably a confraternity figure, had the symbol of resurrection carved.
• The bell tower, updated in 1779, is a good late-Baroque example; remnants of the original medieval church, likely Gothic, survive along the lane by the old porticoes.

Context and history

By 1609 the medieval building had fallen into ruinous condition and dropped out of use, and the Battuti confreres rebuilt it completely, finishing with a new consecration in 1694. That campaign fixed the church's present form — hall, vault, apse, pilastered facade — while the bell tower's 1779 update added the late-Baroque crowning. The arrival of the Franciscan choir after 1803 gave the interior its most valuable furnishing.