Basilica di San Francesco

A plain brick Gothic church on Arezzo's southern edge holds one of the decisive works of the early Renaissance. The Basilica of Saint Francis pairs monochrome severity with the painted brilliance of the Bacci Chapel, and its unfinished facade tells the story of a city that funded art unevenly but enduringly.

Why it matters

Franciscan churches are meant to look austere, and this one obeys the rule: a single tall nave, bare stone, no carved facade to speak of. What happened in the main chapel between 1452 and 1466 changed how European painters handled light, depth and calm: there Piero della Francesca set the entire Legend of the True Cross. The contrast is the point. You enter a building designed for preaching poverty and find the art that funded the Renaissance's afterlife.

The basilica is also the most legible record of how medieval Arezzo grew. The friars arrived in the early 13th century, settled first on the outskirts, and were formally invited inside the walls by the Commune in 1290, when a house and land were donated for church and convent. Construction on Fra' Giovanni da Pistoia's design ran until the 1370s.

What to notice

• The unfinished facade. A devout woman named Monna Tessa left money to face the church in stone; the bequest ran out at the base course, and the work stopped there for good. The rough upper wall against the trimmed lower band is Arezzo's most honest architectural detail.
• The soaring single nave, lit by tall lancet windows, with side chapels opening off it. Below, a lower three-aisled church serves today as an exhibition space.
• Above the main altar, a large painted Crucifix attributed to the Maestro di San Francesco, dated to the 1270s-1280s, with the kneeling figure of Saint Francis adoring Christ — set there long before the frescoes that made the church famous.
• The stained glass of "Il perdono della Porziuncola" by Guillaume de Marcillat, dated 1524, a Renaissance window in a Gothic frame.
• Fresco fragments and panels by Spinello Aretino and Lorentino d'Andrea, and the Rosselli tomb of 1439 carved by Michele da Firenze — a reminder that the Bacci Chapel had artistic neighbours of real quality.
• The bell tower, a later addition built between the late 1500s and early 1600s, replacing the original Gothic silhouette.

Context and history

The Franciscans reached Arezzo during the lifetime of Saint Francis, holding ground on the Maccagnolo hill between 1211 and 1217 and moving to Poggio del Sole by 1232, outside the walls. The 1290 donation brought them into the city proper, and the church rose steadily for the rest of the century. Its architecture keeps the order's preferences: structural clarity, big wall surfaces for preaching imagery, minimal sculpture.

The interior was given a Baroque dressing in the 17th century and stripped of it in a mid-19th-century restoration, which returned the nave to something close to its medieval severity. The great chapel of the Bacci family, at the head of the main nave, was frescoed first by Bicci di Lorenzo, who began in 1447 and died leaving the work scarcely begun; Piero della Francesca took over in 1452 and finished in 1466. The scenes, drawn from Jacopo da Varagine's 13th-century Golden Legend, follow the wood of the True Cross from Eden to its recovery at Jerusalem.