Collegiata di San Francesco

The church of San Francesco is Corinaldo's principal church and its longest story: a first stone blessed by a cardinal in 1265, a bell cast in 1281 that still rings from the tower, a rebuilding of the 1750s, three canvases by the town's own painter Claudio Ridolfi, and the font at which Maria Goretti was baptised in 1890.

Why it matters

Every hill town in the Marche has a church of San Francesco, but few carry this density of civic memory in one building. The tourist portal dates the first stone to 1265, blessed by Cardinal Simone Paltinieri, and notes that the works were probably finished by 1281 — the year a bell was cast that the same portal says still hangs in the tower, an unbroken acoustic thread of more than seven centuries. The present church, however, is eighteenth-century, rebuilt after earthquake damage to designs by the architect Arcangelo Vici of Arcevia. It combines a medieval mendicant foundation with Rococo design. The Goretti connection is also significant — the baptismal font where the girl who would become one of the Catholic Church's youngest modern saints was christened the day after her birth in 1890 — and the church forms an important part of Corinaldo's civic and religious history.

What to notice

The church is laid out as a single nave in the shape of a Latin cross, with side chapels, a dome over the transept and an apse. The façade, as the portal page observes, was never finished, while the interior preserves much of the church's artistic interest. Three paintings by Claudio Ridolfi hang here — an Annunciazione, a Madonna col Bambino with Saints Anna, Giuseppe and Antonio da Padova, and an Assunzione della Vergine — and the civic gallery also bears his name. In the third chapel on the right stands the church's oldest treasure: a wooden crucifix of 1575, which the parish and municipal histories attribute to an Urbino sculptor. The parish history also records traces of the medieval building surviving in the bell tower — small arches and decorative motifs — and a wooden altar that came from the destroyed church of San Pietro. A marble plaque marks the font as the place of Maria Goretti's baptism, and a white Carrara marble monument to "Marietta" stands nearby with a bust of Pius XII, the pope who canonised her.

Context and history

The sequence of campaigns is unusually well recorded. The mendicant church of 1265–1281 served until the sixteenth century, when a new cloister rose beside the convent in 1528 and the church was enlarged in 1538. Growth kept outrunning the fabric, and in 1638–1639 the building was rebuilt in the taste of its day. The earthquakes of the eighteenth century, above all the shock of 1727, forced the decisive intervention: between 1752 and 1759 the present church rose to Arcangelo Vici's design, while the convent works, begun earlier, were completed in 1749. By the early 1800s observers praised it — the parish history quotes a judgement calling it perhaps the finest church of the commune — and the parish title was transferred here in the nineteenth century, the parish chronicle placing the move around the 1830s. Dates, not legend, fix the Goretti connection: the child born at Corinaldo on 16 October 1890 was christened in this church the following day, 17 October; a monument to her later rose beside the font; and San Francesco remains part of the town's devotional memory of her.