Oratorio della Madonna del Morbo

When plague burned through the Apennine towns around them, the people of Poppi credited the Madonna with their escape — and paid the debt in architecture. Between 1651 and 1659 they raised this compact hexagonal oratory, topped by a scale-tiled dome whose interior glitters with a painted sky of stars.

Why it matters

The building is a vow made visible, and the ownership papers still say so: the oratory's statute declares it the property of the popolo di Poppi, because the whole community funded it in thanks for deliverance from the epidemic of the plague years — the outbreak that swept the surrounding territory in the late 1620s and that Alessandro Manzoni later fixed in the national memory with I Promessi Sposi. Its designer was no architect by trade but Francesco Folli, a physician of Poppi, which gives the commission an unusual intimacy: the man who fought the disease in person drew the temple of thanksgiving. As a piece of small-scale Tuscan baroque — "barocchetto toscano" in the guidebooks' phrase — it has few rivals in the valley.

What to notice

The building has six faces, pilasters and a high drum supporting the outer dome, which is sheathed in scale-shaped tiles and crowned by a lantern. The dome's inside surface is the point of the whole design — a star-studded sky, the Madonna's protection painted as the firmament itself. The oratory stands on Piazza Amerighi, facing the Propositura dei Santi Marco e Lorenzo across the square. Hexagonal votive churches were a deliberate choice for plague thanksgiving; this example preserves that compact geometry.

Context and history

Poppi had watched the contagion approach through the surrounding districts and, by its own account, been spared; the votive church was the town's formal answer. Work ran from 1651 to 1659 on Folli's design, at the community's expense, and the resulting oratory entered the town's statute as common property rather than clerical possession — a status that makes it a civic as well as an ecclesiastical monument. The dedication to the Madonna del Morbo — Our Lady of Sickness — belongs to a family of plague oratories across Tuscany, but Poppi's hexagon, scale dome and lantern make it one of the type's most finished examples in the Casentino, and its interior one of the most atmospheric small rooms between Florence and Arezzo.