Chiesa di San Francesco di Piazza

Behind Corso Mazzini, entered through a fifteenth-century cloister, Arcevia's Franciscan church conceals a barocchetto interior remodelled by Lorenzo Bossi in 1750, a trecento Vergine del Parto fresco — the oldest painting in town — and paired Ramazzani canvases of the 1590s.

Why it matters

Arcevia's Franciscan church does not announce itself. The building sequence explains the effect: Franciscans raised the church and convent in the thirteenth century, the medieval shell survives in a Romanesque portal of pink and white stone and a massive stone bell tower, and in 1750 the architect and modeller Lorenzo Bossi redid the interior completely in barocchetto, the light, sculptural late-baroque manner of the Marche. The result is a single room where stucco, gilding and painted atmosphere meet, guarded by a fresco of the Vergine del Parto that the Comune's own itinerary calls the oldest evidence of painting in Arcevia. This is the finest church interior in the historic centre after the Collegiata, and the most surprising.

What to notice

The Romanesque doorway on Corso Mazzini has two small carved faces beside it. Bossi's stuccoes and the crucifix above the high altar shape the interior. To the left of the entrance, on the stair that leads to the organ, sits the Vergine del Parto, a Madonna and Child with angels of the Umbro-Marchigian school, fourteenth century, traditionally invoked by expectant mothers. In the presbytery area, the detailed catalogue compiled by Musei Italiani records two canvases of the 1590s by Ercole Ramazzani, the Baptism of Christ of 1593 and the Ascension of 1594, an eighteenth-century choir in solid walnut, and a gilded ciborium and baldachin; the chapel of San Bonaventura lost its Signorelli altarpiece, painted on commission in 1508, to the Napoleonic removals — it now hangs in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.

Context and history

The Franciscans arrived in Arcevia in the thirteenth century: the official portal dates the church and convent to the 1200s, the Comune's itinerary attests the complex from the end of that century, when the friars built a convent inside the historic centre, and the Musei Italiani account adds that the land was a donation from the commune, around 1275. Remodellings followed — the entrance portal was moved to the main street by the late fourteenth century — and in 1750 came Lorenzo Bossi's barocchetto transformation, the same campaign that gave the church its eight statues of historical figures. Arcevia has a second, entirely different Franciscan building, the church of San Francesco di Paola near Porta del Sasso of 1728–30; the two are frequently confused, and this record concerns only the convent church on Corso Mazzini. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the whole conventual complex was restored and converted into the town's cultural pole — library, historical archive and exhibition rooms — with the State Archaeological Museum installed in rooms beside the cloister, so the church forms part of a cultural complex that also houses the town library, historical archive and State Archaeological Museum.