Basilica dei XII Apostoli

South of Lodi, this austere brick basilica in the countryside of Lodi Vecchio stands where the diocese began. Founded in honour of the Apostles in the late fourth century and rebuilt in Gothic style in the Trecento, it keeps frescoes and reliefs of the 1300s that make it one of the most rewarding medieval stops in the Lodigiano.

Why it matters

The church preserves a layered account of local history. This was the principal church of the early Lodi diocese, raised just outside the walls of the vanished Roman town of Laus Pompeia, and it kept that role even after the city itself was destroyed twice by Milan and refounded six kilometres to the north. The present structure is the product of an early fourteenth-century rebuilding in Lombard Gothic, and its walls carry a large cycle of frescoes and sculptural reliefs from the same century. Declared a national monument in 1875, it survives today in a quiet agricultural setting that has changed little around it.

What to notice

The brick façade divided by slender lesene into three sections, with a central round-arched portal, a rose window and a niche holding a modern copy of the statue of San Bassiano — the original is in Lodi's cathedral. A stretch of opus spicatum masonry in the first bay on the south side herringbone brickwork that betrays an earlier Romanesque phase. Inside, the three naves rest on stone capitals of real historic interest. The fresco programme includes in the apse basin Christ blesses within a mandorla, ringed by the symbols of the Evangelists and saints, and below runs a painted cornice of false-perspective corbels over a row of Apostles. Around the church hang numerous further fourteenth-century frescoes and reliefs, and a 1323 bas-relief closes one of the side aisles. Historians group much of this painting under the name of an anonymous Maestro di San Bassiano; local guilds helped pay for it, and among the scenes are four ox-drawn carts painted against starred backgrounds, a rare glimpse of medieval country work.

Context and history

Tradition places the consecration of the original Basilica Apostolorum at the end of the fourth century, in the presence of St Ambrose of Milan; the church was dedicated to San Bassiano, first bishop of Lodi, who was buried here, and by the Middle Ages it bore his name. When ancient Lodi was razed — in 1111 and again in 1158 — the basilica outlasted the destruction, and in 1163 the saint's remains were translated with great ceremony to the new city's cathedral. The old church passed to the Benedictines and was rebuilt in the early decades of the fourteenth century in Lombard Gothic, promoted by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the new Lodi. Centuries of decline followed, until a series of restorations from the late nineteenth century onward, including work on the facade between 1902 and 1908, returned the building to dignity; the apse frescoes were most recently restored in 2021.