Basilica di Sant'Agata

Asciano's principal church, the Basilica di Sant'Agata, has a Romanesque-Gothic body of pale travertine, a Gothic facade and a much-venerated wooden crucifix. It is the town's religious landmark in the Crete Senesi.

Why it matters

The church's documented history begins in 1029 and 1040, when it inherited the baptismal role of the older pieve of Sant'Ippolito, recorded as early as 714. These dates describe successive churches, not an unbroken thousand-year ministry on the same site. The present body combines Romanesque and Gothic features, including a Gothic facade with three blind pointed arches and a rose window, and a dome over the presbytery within an octagonal lantern. The fifteenth-century wooden crucifix is venerated as miraculous and is associated with Asciano's September celebrations.

What to notice

The facade is built of squared travertine in fine courses, with leaf-carved capitals and the town's arms—a bear's paw gripping an axe—above the portal. The broad Gothic nave was added in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, changing an earlier Greek-cross plan into a Latin cross; the terracotta floor preserves the footprint of the earlier church.

At the high altar stands the fifteenth-century crucifix, by an unknown sculptor. On the left wall is a round fresco of the Deposition attributed by the parish to il Sodoma; nearby is Francesco Vanni's canvas of the Madonna enthroned between St Agatha and St Bernardino. The Via Crucis of fourteen ceramic panels, painted in 1790 by local potter Francesco Francini, reflects Asciano's history of ceramic production. A travertine font from Sant'Ippolito remains in use.

Context and history

The church was under the Diocese of Arezzo from 1045, confirmed by a papal bull of Alexander III in 1178, before joining the Diocese of Siena in the 1970s. Pope Paul III raised it to a collegiate church in 1542, and in 1991 it received the rank of minor basilica.

The interior owes much to a nineteenth-century restoration directed by Giuseppe Partini, who between 1878 and 1885 removed seven Baroque altars, built the high altar and replastered the nave. A later campaign in 1954 removed that plaster to expose the travertine. The detached square bell tower dates to the second half of the thirteenth century; it was raised by one storey in the late sixteenth century. Works once displayed on the basilica's altars, including panels by leading Sienese painters, are now in the nearby Museo di Palazzo Corboli.