Chiesa di Sant'Agostino

Beneath the walls of the old town, where the lanes drop towards the orange groves, Sant'Agostino keeps the severe brick face of its Augustinian builders. A crenellated apse, maiolica bowls set above the portal and Pericle Fazzini's carved Via Crucis make this one of the most atmospheric stops in Grottammare's hill quarter.

Why it matters

The church and its convent, built by the Augustinian fathers between the end of the fifteenth century and 1517, are recorded by FAI — the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, which has listed and campaigned for the building — as a complex formed of church and attached convent on the edge of Grottammare's borgo antico. Its architecture is deliberately poor in materials and rich in character: a facade without decoration, closed by a simple gable roof, built of irregular bricks of varying sizes and reclaimed material, in the honest manner of mendicant building.

What lifts the church above the ordinary is the combination of that austerity with two remarkable features: the set of maiolica bowls arranged in a cross above the portal, following Augustinian custom, and a fortified, crenellated apse that faces the sea — the architecture of a praying community on a coast that remembered pirate raids. Inside hangs a modern masterpiece of religious sculpture: the Via Crucis in low relief by Grottammare's greatest artist, Pericle Fazzini.

What to notice

The facade reveals the irregular brick courses, the reused stones, and the dressed block in the left corner incised with late-Gothic characters that — the comune notes — have never been deciphered. Above the portal are maiolica basins set crosswise, a signature of Augustinian building practice in this part of Italy.

The apse side has a defensive character: crenellation runs along the top, two buttresses cross the wall externally, and the truncated bell tower beside it carries the church's strangest story. Tradition recorded by FAI holds that the tower was cut short as punishment for the convent having hosted Martin Luther on his journey towards Rome — a legend worth repeating only as tradition, but one that has clung to the building for centuries.

The single nave has exposed wooden roof trusses. Its artworks include a fresco of the Madonna della Misericordia from the first half of the sixteenth century, two canvases at the main altar, including a Pietà with San Nicola di Bari and the souls in purgatory, and the Fazzini Via Crucis: low-relief panels whose interlaced lines, hollowed faces and oblique waves, in the comune's description, carry the whole drama of the stations.

Context and history

The Augustinians arrived on this site when Grottammare's hill town was completing its medieval form, building from the late 1400s to a structure essentially finished by 1517, on ground that had hosted an earlier place of worship according to the comune. Their convent — a square-plan building around a central cloister with round-arched arcades on massive piers, its upper floor loggias partly bricked up in later centuries — followed on the south side.

The community's independent life ended in the papal reform of the mid-seventeenth century: FAI records the convent as suppressed in 1653 by the bull of Pope Innocenzo X, the measure that dissolved Italy's smaller religious houses and scattered their communities. The church itself survived as a place of worship, accumulating its sixteenth-century fresco, its Baroque-era altar canvases and, in the twentieth century, the Fazzini reliefs that now form its artistic centre of gravity.

The building featured in the Giornate FAI di Primavera programme in 2014 and in the association's I Luoghi del Cuore heritage surveys of 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022. The Via Crucis is among the municipality's works associated with the sculptor.