Chiesa di San Francesco

Bevagna built its Franciscan church at the town's highest point, on ground that had carried a Roman temple. Inside hang paintings by Dono Doni and Ascensidonio Spacca, a small dome glazed with terracottas attributed to Santi Buglioni, and beside the altar, the stone of the preaching to the birds at Piandarca.

Why it matters

Of all the stories attached to Umbria, few travel further than Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds, and Bevagna preserves a physical anchor of that episode: the stone on which, tradition holds, the saint stood at Piandarca, outside the town, now kept in a chapel beside this church's altar. The building that guards it is itself a fine late-thirteenth-century Franciscan church, raised over an earlier oratory of San Giovanni Battista on the acropolis of the Roman town. Its interior was modernised in the eighteenth century but kept — and gained — a serious art collection: canvases and panels by Dono Doni of Assisi and by Bevagna's own Ascensidonio Spacca, and a chapel dome fitted with glazed terracottas attributed to Santi Buglioni, the master of Renaissance Umbrian ceramics. San Francesco brings together Franciscan memory, sixteenth-century painting and the architecture of a mendicant church.

What to notice

From the street, the gable-shaped facade is plain by mendicant rule, but its portal repays attention: a round-arched, polystyle doorway — columns multiplying in its jamb structure — with capitals carved in foliated marble. Inside, the single nave shows the eighteenth-century renovation's clean lines; the paintings include works by Dono Doni and Ascensidonio Spacca, the latter Bevagna's most productive sixteenth-century hand, also represented in the church of Santi Domenico e Giacomo. A small door on the right opens into an inner chapel frescoed in the sixteenth century. The second chapel on the right, possibly designed by Galeazzo Alessi, holds a refined fifteenth-century tabernacle. Its small dome is covered with glazed terracottas attributed to Santi Buglioni, their surfaces reflecting light from a side window. Finally, next to the main altar, the chapel of the Piandarca stone encloses the rough block on which Francis is said to have stood when he preached to the birds — an object of pilgrimage more than a work of art, and the emotional centre of the church.

Context and history

Franciscan houses spread across Umbria within decades of the saint's death, and Bevagna's was established at the summit of the town, a site associated with the Roman acropolis and an earlier sacred precinct. The late thirteenth-century church, erected over an oratory of San Giovanni Battista, followed the austere single-nave plan the order favoured for preaching to crowds. The interior renovation of the eighteenth century refreshed the space without erasing its holdings, and works by Doni and Spacca strengthened the church's links with the artistic traditions of Assisi and Bevagna. The Piandarca stone links the building to the plain below Bevagna, where Francis's bird sermon is placed by tradition; the relic's translation into the church made the summit of the town a mnemonic of the valley's most famous miracle. The chapel possibly designed by Alessi — the Genoese mannerist who worked in Perugia's cathedral — adds a Renaissance architectural note to an otherwise medieval and baroque ensemble.