Chiesa di Santa Maria della Piana

Outside the walls of Castiglioni, Arcevia's most understated church waits at the edge of the fields: Santa Maria della Piana, a small Romanesque building whose recent restoration returned to the light a fresco of Saint Sebastian attributed to Andrea di Bartolo da Jesi and dated 1474.

Why it matters

Santa Maria della Piana is a Romanesque church at Castiglioni, where restoration brought a fresco back to light. Between the parish church on the piazza of Castiglioni and the castle gates stands an older, quieter building, rectangular and unornamented, that keeps a painted Saint Sebastian by Andrea di Bartolo da Jesi, a painter documented by the official castle page with the date 1474. The church offers a rural counterpart to the fortified villages: the countryside phase of medieval religion, in a building that has needed no enlargement since the Middle Ages.

What to notice

The facade is a plain rectangle with a simple portal, the sort of front the Romanesque raised across the Marche countryside when a church's job was to mark a field-edge consecration rather than to impress a town. Inside, the restored surfaces frame the fresco of Saint Sebastian — attributed by the official page to Andrea di Bartolo da Jesi and dated 1474 — a devotional image of the plague-saint appropriate to an isolated rural church. Its fresco can be compared with works by Ercole Ramazzani in nearby Sant'Agata: two generations, two registers, one village. Outside, note the relationship to the castle walls and the two fortified gates of Castiglioni; the church stands just off the defensive line, at the point where cultivated ground begins.

Context and history

Castiglioni is recorded as a castellare in 1289 and was heavily fortified by the commune of Roccacontrada — medieval Arcevia — from the fifteenth century, guarding the border towards Serra de' Conti. Santa Maria della Piana belongs to an earlier, agrarian layer of that landscape: the portal's church page dates the building to the twelfth century, its castle page to the thirteenth, and both agree on its position outside the walls and its Romanesque character. Regional accounts date the Romanesque building to either the twelfth or thirteenth century; it is among the district's oldest surviving structures. Its restoration is recent, and the recovery of the Saint Sebastian fresco — the official pages describe both the restoration and the brought-to-light fresco — restored to view a painter otherwise associated with the Jesi area, extending the map of Andrea di Bartolo's activity into the upper Misa country.