Chiesa di San Biagio

The church of Fiuggi's patron saint is also the town's oldest: a rural place of worship where Benedictine monks once changed horses on the road to Montecassino, documented by three papal bulls between 1114 and 1189, and now keeping a Giotto-school fresco and two seventeenth-century altarpieces carried here from Rome.

Why it matters

San Biagio stands outside the borgo walls, and that position is its biography. The municipal heritage portal calls it the most ancient church of Anticoli di Campagna — Fiuggi's name until 1911 — though its construction date is unknown; around the year 1000 it belonged to the Benedictine monks of Subiaco, who stopped here to rest and change horses on their journeys to Montecassino, and it later passed to the Florensi monks of the monastery of Santa Maria della Gloria in Anagni. The church's memory is fixed by papal bulls of Pasquale II (1114), Alessandro III (1161) and Clemente III (1189) — three documented anchors rare for a rural church of the Ciociaria. Its dedication to Saint Blaise, bishop and martyr, marks him as patron of the city, honoured alongside the apostles Peter and Paul.

What to notice

Inside a modest Baroque envelope, three works reward attention. The finest is the fresco of the Madonna con il Bambino, dated by the portal to the thirteenth century and attributed to a Giotto school — a fragment of the church's medieval decoration that survived the Baroque remaking. The stone acquasantiera, the stoup at the entrance, was carved from the capital of a Roman column brought, according to the portal, from Nero's villa in the valley of Subiaco, so the basin that greets you is a piece of Roman architecture turned liturgical furniture. On the walls hang two canvases rescued from the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Fonte in via Urbana: San Lorenzo battezza Sant'Ippolito by Giambattista Speranza (1600–1640), a pupil of Albani, and the Madonna con Bambino tra San Francesco e Sant'Agostino by Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavalier d'Arpino (1568–1640); both were restored by the Lazio Superintendency.

Context and history

In the seventeenth century, Bishop Antonio Seneca of Anagni had a new Collegiata built inside the castle, as the old arcipretal church stood outside the walls. The Anticolani, however, refused to abandon their ancient place of worship: they restored it and enlarged it on a Baroque model, preserving portions of the original structure, and rededicated it to San Biagio, the city's patron. Local legend dates devotion to the patron to 1298, when Saint Blaise was credited with turning away attackers after the town appeared to be in flames. The saint himself, bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, was martyred around 316 under the persecution of Licinius and is invoked against ailments of the throat.