Rotonda di San Lorenzo

Beneath the level of Piazza delle Erbe waits the oldest church in Mantua: a brick rotunda raised in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, echoing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Lost for three hundred years inside tenements and shops, it was cut free in 1906 and now stands as a rare surviving medieval interior.

Why it matters

The Rotonda di San Lorenzo is the earliest surviving church in Mantua, founded between the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and traditionally linked to the world of Matilde di Canossa. Its circular plan, modelled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, belongs to a family of northern Italian round churches built at the time of the crusading era, and nothing else in Mantua reaches this far back in stone and brick. Its history is marked by a double life: deconsecrated in 1579 and buried inside later housing for over three centuries, it was rediscovered and stripped bare in the early twentieth century.

What to notice

The church lies below the level of the square, with low light, Roman and medieval spolia, and a hush that Piazza delle Erbe's cafés sit only metres above. The plan is central: a ring of ten columns — two of them Roman marble shafts reused from demolished buildings — separates the nave from an ambulatory, with a gallery above and a small apse to the east. Fragments of fresco in the small vaults show rigid figures and stylised faces attributed to an eleventh-century master working in the Byzantine manner; a later fifteenth-century apse fragment depicts Saint Lawrence, the church's dedicatee, on his grill. The brickwork is Lombard in tradition, with ninth-to-twelfth-century stone pilasters salvaged from earlier structures, and the whole reads as a building assembled from the wreckage of older Mantua.

Context and history

The rotunda served the market square that grew around it until 1579, when Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga suppressed it for worship. The dome collapsed, houses and shops were built against and over the church, the nave became a courtyard, and for more than three hundred years Mantuans lived around a church they had forgotten. Rediscovery came in 1906, when the later additions were stripped away and the rotunda restored and returned to worship. Since 1926 it has been entrusted to the Dominican community, and today it is maintained and opened by the Associazione per i Monumenti Domenicani — an unusual arrangement that keeps a thousand-year-old building in daily religious and cultural use at the centre of a commercial square.