Chiesa di San Clemente

Inside Genga's castle borgo, the church of San Clemente preserves an early layer of the town’s religious history: founded with the castle itself in the eleventh century and named in the medieval deed that transferred the castle to the counts, it later housed the parish's sacred-art collection — its treasures including a terracotta dossale credited to the school of Pietro Paolo Agabiti.

Why it matters

San Clemente is the memory-keeper of the borgo. San Clemente was the first parish church of the medieval castle, founded in the eleventh century and modified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its name appears in the agreement by which the abbot of San Vittore granted the castle to the Conti della Genga. The church later became a repository for artworks from the parish and neighbouring churches.

What to notice

The building is small and deliberately spare, as befits a castellan pieve, so the eye goes to what it contains. A terracotta dossale attributed to the school of Pietro Paolo Agabiti depicts the Madonna della Misericordia with the Mysteries of the Rosary — a significant example of Marche Renaissance production in this material. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alterations renewed doorways, altars and furnishings as the borgo grew around it. Note also the position on Piazza San Clemente, an upper square of the castle, where the church's age relative to its neighbours reads clearly in the masonry.

Context and history

The church's story runs parallel to the castle's. In a grant dated 1090, the abbot of San Vittore alle Chiuse conceded the castle in enfiteusi to the counts of Genga; San Clemente already belonged to the settlement's definition, and it served the castle community as its principal church through the Middle Ages. Its dedication to Pope Clement I belongs to an early stratum of cult in the Marche countryside. As the borgo expanded, the church of Santa Maria Assunta assumed the parish role, and San Clemente survived as the ancient pieve of the castle. In the twentieth century the building took on a new cultural duty: into its rooms the parish of San Clemente and the neighbouring churches brought their artistic patrimony — the collection includes paintings, sculptures and vestments, reliquaries, chalices and old liturgical books — a holding that has since fed the castle's MAST museum circuit.