Cattedrale di San Lorenzo

Viterbo's cathedral crowns the Colle del Duomo, where a church dedicated to Saint Lawrence already stood in the eighth century. Rebuilt along Romanesque lines from 1192, battered by 1944 bombing and carefully returned to its medieval character, it shares its square with the papal palace.

Why it matters

This is the cathedral of the Diocese of Viterbo and the religious counterpart to the papal palace beside it. When the popes moved their court to the city in the thirteenth century, San Lorenzo became their church, and the whole hill took the name it still carries: the Colle del Duomo. The building also carries the scars of the twentieth century. Bombs in 1944 gutted part of the structure, and the reconstruction that followed made a deliberate choice, restoring the overall Romanesque appearance you see today rather than the baroque dress of earlier centuries. Tradition adds an older layer still: the Diocese of Viterbo records that the cathedral is believed to rise on the ruins of a pagan temple to Hercules, with a parish church attested on the hill by the 700s.

What to notice

The central nave preserves a Cosmatesque floor, a marble mosaic feature restored more than once. The right nave contains a fifteenth-century baptismal font and the chapels of Santa Caterina and Saints Valentino and Ilario. The left nave holds the funerary monument of Pope John XXI, buried outside Rome, together with the Chapel of Saint Lucy and its Baroque frescoes. Near the start of that nave hangs a 1472 panel by Gerolamo da Cremona showing the Redeemer blessing between four saints. Behind the presbytery, the postwar rebuilding created a double apse. The Baroque section behind the newer apse has a seventeenth-century vault frescoed by Giuseppe Passeri with the Last Judgment and Cardinal Virtues, alongside a canvas of Saint Lawrence in glory by Romanelli. A reproduction of the Madonna della Carbonara hangs in the church; the original is held by the Museo Colle del Duomo.

Context and history

The transformation into a Romanesque cathedral began in 1192, and the bell tower was reshaped in 1369 with the two-tone colouring typical of central Italian gothic work; the regional tourism authority notes its affinities with Tuscan gothic. The facade dates to 1570, when Cardinal Giovan Francesco De Gambara ordered a new front for the church. Further reworking followed in the seventeenth century. The 1944 bombing damaged the cathedral together with much of the hill, and the postwar rebuilding, while restoring the Romanesque face, produced the curious double apse. Beside the church, Cardinal Muzio Gallo commissioned a monumental sacristy, lined in walnut root and gold.