Chiesa di San Francesco

One of the principal medieval monuments of Lodi is a Romanesque-Gothic church whose story starts in 1252, when the Franciscans were readmitted to the city. Its unfinished brick front, its open twin windows and its frescoed chapels hold the most complete survey of local painting in Lodi, from the Trecento onward.

Why it matters

The Franciscans arrived in Lodi with the bishop's blessing in 1252 and built a church that became a reference point for the city's Gothic. Its facade, stopped abruptly above the great rose window and pierced by twin windows open to the sky, is the first documented instance of a trick that spread across northern Italy in the following two centuries: leaving the upper openings unglazed to lighten the mass of the front. Inside, the naves preserve a votive fresco naming the family that paid for the building, a 1477 narrative cycle of twenty-two panels on the life of San Bernardino, and the tombs of some of Lodi's most famous figures. Few provincial Italian cities keep so much of their medieval painting in its original setting.

What to notice

The façade is deliberately incomplete: rough brick above, a marble rose window at the centre, and a ground-level porch on slender terracotta columns raised on tall stone bases. The bifore "a cielo" — open-air twin windows — are the detail to remember. Inside, three naves run on cylindrical piers under pointed cross vaults toward a transept with side chapels. In the right transept stands the votive fresco of the Madonna and Child with Saints Nicholas and Francis, with Antonio Fissiraga and his wife presenting a model of the church — the founding donor's portrait, attributed to an anonymous local painter known as the Maestro dei Fissiraga. In the third chapel of the right aisle, dedicated to San Bernardino, Gian Giacomo da Lodi frescoed the saint's life in 1477 in twenty-two panels whose perspective experiments mark a humanist turn in local painting. Later sixteenth-century frescoes accompany the tombs of the poet Ada Negri and the scientist Agostino Bassi rest here, linking the church to Lodi's cultural memory.

Context and history

In 1252 Bishop Bongiovanni Fissiraga brought the Minor friars back to Lodi — they had been driven out by the Ghibelline faction — and settled them at the small church of San Nicolò. Building of the present church followed in the 1280s, pushed forward by the Fissiraga family; by 1290 it was far enough advanced to receive the bishop's remains. The Romanesque-Gothic body, with pointed arches on cylindrical piers, belongs to a pattern familiar across Lombardy, but the facade's open bifore made it original and influential. The Barnabites have governed the church since 1840, and it is listed among Italy's national monuments. Nearby, the former convent now forms part of the San Francesco college complex, which hosts the city's natural science museum — the church has always been an intellectual as much as a spiritual centre.