Cattedrale di Santa Firmina

At the highest point of Amelia, the cathedral of Santa Firmina gathers the city's faith and art history under one roof: the tombs of its patron saints, banners said to come from Lepanto, panels by Federico Zuccari and works from Agostino di Duccio's circle, all within a church rebuilt after a catastrophic fire of 1629.

Why it matters

The cathedral stands on the Sacrum Verticem, the sacred summit of the ancient town. A place of worship has existed here since at least the sixth century, and the church was consecrated to Santa Firmina in the ninth century when the bodies of the martyrs Firmina and Olimpiade were translated here. The building's layers, from its early Christian origins to its Baroque interior, make it a record of Amelia's religious history. Its chapels preserve the memory of families and artists who shaped the town, while its paintings connect it to the Umbrian and Roman Renaissance.

What to notice

At the entrance, a small marble column is traditionally identified as the one to which Santa Firmina was bound during her martyrdom. In the Farrattini chapel, two processional banners are held, perhaps seized from the Turkish fleet at Lepanto in 1571, beside an early panel by Federico Zuccari and the marble funerary monuments of Bartolomeo II and Baldo Farrattini, the work of Giovanni Antonio Dosio and of the Orvietan sculptor Ippolito Scalza. The right transept keeps a Last Supper of 1538 painted by Giovan Francesco Perini; the left transept preserves a fifteenth-century panel by the Master of the Assunta of Amelia, venerated as miraculous after the 1703 earthquake and shown to the public only in August. The quattrocento baptismal font is crowned by a statue of John the Baptist of Donatellesque inspiration. The tomb of Bishop Giovanni Geraldini has a bas-relief of the Madonna and Child from the workshop of Agostino di Duccio, which also produced the tomb slab of Bishop Ruggero Mandosi. The vault and dome frescoes, painted in 1887 by Luigi Fontana, cap the nave in the purist taste of the late nineteenth century.

Context and history

A brazier left burning by an organ builder destroyed most of the right side of the nave on 19 December 1629. The restoration that followed, completed in 1677, transformed the medieval structure: the floor was lowered, the crypt demolished, and a new high altar raised above the recovered bodies of Firmina and Olimpiade. The facade, begun in that campaign, remained unfinished until 1887. Earlier layers include a Romanesque rebuilding in 1220 after fire or earthquake, damage during the imperial occupation of Frederick II in 1240, lateral chapels added in 1323–24, and choir stalls carved in 1411.