Complesso di Santi Giovanni e Reparata

Santi Giovanni e Reparata, identified as Lucca's first cathedral, layers a Romanesque church over remains from Roman, paleochristian, Lombard and medieval phases.

Why it matters

Excavations begun in the late 1970s revealed a fifth-century basilica, a paleochristian baptistery, a first-century BC Roman domus, first- and second-century AD baths, Lombard burials and a Carolingian crypt beneath the present church.

What to notice

Early Christian floor mosaics, wall fragments and thresholds remain among the excavated structures beneath the later church. The baptistery's font is decorated with coloured marble inlays. Nave columns, many of them Roman spolia, preserve material reused from earlier buildings. The church is a three-nave basilica with a transept and flat wooden ceiling; its whitewashed sixteenth-century facings imitate stone. The church's architecture reflects its successive medieval and early modern phases.

Context and history

The medieval church developed in stages: its Romanesque body rose in the second half of the twelfth century, the baptistery with its ogival dome was added at the end of the fourteenth, and a sixteenth-century campaign raised the facade, opened new light sources and installed the coffered ceiling. A Baroque chapel of Sant'Ignazio followed on the north side in the seventeenth century. After the Republic fell, the building served as the archive of the ancient Republic's records under Napoleonic-era Lucca; it was reconsecrated in 1828. Between 1840 and 1870 it functioned as a burial church for the city's notables, whose commemorative slabs remain on its walls. Puccini was baptised here, and his father Michele's funeral was held in the church in February 1864; in his oration, composer Giovanni Pacini pointed to the boy as the family's artistic heir.