Chiesa di San Silvestro (Piegaro)

Parish and legend meet in Piegaro's patronal church: first recorded in 1275, rebuilt to its present form by 1864, and hung with images that bind the town to its name-saint, from an Umbrian-school Madonna flanked by plague saints to a crucifix said to have sweated a cerulean dew in 1738.

Why it matters

San Silvestro is the religious and civic centre of Piegaro, the church that carries the town's dedication to Pope Sylvester I and gathers its artistic memory in one nave. The building is documented from 1275 and may be older, with its present appearance the result of a long rebuilding finished in 1864. Its paintings trace exactly the concerns of a small hill community across four centuries: protection from plague, devotion to the crucified Christ, and a visual argument, rare in a parish church, linking the town's patron to the first Christian emperor. The church remains within the historic fabric of Piegaro's borgo.

What to notice

The sixteenth-century Madonna and Child between Saints Sebastian and Roch, attributed to the Umbrian school: Sebastian and Roch were the standard intercessors against plague, so the painting doubles as a record of local epidemics. A seventeenth-century wooden crucifix is associated with the reported event of 1738, when it was said to have exuded a bluish sweat; such sudoria were formally investigated in Papal Italy and often generated devotion around an image. The Cristo giustiziere — Christ as judge — is painted between Catherine of Siena and Dominic, and beside it appears a sixteenth-century view of Piegaro itself, one of the oldest visual documents of the town's silhouette. The painting of Emperor Constantine before Pope Sylvester, surrounded by the four Evangelists, advertises the hagiography behind the town's patron: the legendary baptism of Constantine made Sylvester one of the most authority-laden figures of the medieval papacy.

Context and history

In documents the church first surfaces in the thirteenth century, roughly a generation before Piegaro's 1295 emergence as a free commune — an emergence that followed years in which lordship of the town shuttled from the Montemarte of Montegabbione to the Filippeschi of Orvieto and finally to the counts Bulgarelli of Marsciano. As the patronal church it stood at the head of the town's religious year while the glass economy grew around it from the late 1200s onward. By the nineteenth century the medieval fabric no longer suited the community that the glass trade had enriched, and the rebuilding concluded in 1864 gave the town the church it still uses. The Madonna, the crucifix associated with the 1738 event, the Cristo giustiziere with its town view and the Constantine canvas form the core of the church's artistic collection. The church's history is closely connected with Piegaro's historic centre and its glassmaking heritage.