Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta

Sarzana's cathedral rises where the bishops of Luni moved their seat in 1204, on the site of an older parish church. Inside are a painted crucifix dated 1138 and attributed to Maestro Guglielmo, and a relic of the Holy Blood venerated since the twelfth century.

Why it matters

The cathedral's history is tied to the transfer of the episcopal see from Luni to Sarzana. Pope Innocent III authorized the canons to move from Luni, and the see officially passed to Sarzana in 1204. The cathedral developed over the following centuries and remains a landmark of Sarzana's historic centre. The parish history records that the building stands over the earlier pieve of San Basilio, cited in a bull of Pope Eugene III dated 11 November 1148. Sarzana also gave the church a pope: in 1447 the Sarzanese Tommaso Parentucelli was elected as Nicholas V, and the square in front of the cathedral carries his name today.

What to notice

The church's stonework reflects late Gothic Tuscan forms, with a Latin cross plan and three aisles divided by arcades. Inside, slender polygonal marble columns carry wide round arches; the columns on one side wear carved capitals with animal and human protomes, the others simple vegetal motifs. Two notable works are:

• The painted crucifix of Maestro Guglielmo, dated 1138 and executed in tempera on canvas. The Sarzana tourism portal describes it as the oldest painted cross in Italy; its inscribed date is an important reference for medieval painting.
• The relic of the Holy Blood, honoured in the chapel to the right of the main altar. Its earliest surviving container, a pierced silver ark reliquary of the eighth century in Coptic-Syrian style, is now displayed in the Diocesan Museum.

Context and history

Work on the old pieve continued after the transfer of the see in 1204, with activity recorded in the city statutes of 1269. By about the middle of the fourteenth century the cathedral was nearly finished in the late-Gothic Tuscan manner: three aisles ending in an apse and two side chapels, covered by open wooden trusses. Tommaso Parentucelli, born in Sarzana, was elected Pope Nicholas V in 1447. The cathedral is now a basilica-concathedral of the Diocese of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato. The canons brought the relics of Luni, including the ampulla of the Precious Blood, to the new cathedral, which received pilgrims who came to venerate them.