Basilica di San Valentino

Outside Terni’s centre, the Basilica of Saint Valentine keeps the tomb of the city's bishop and martyr, the saint whose February feast day the modern world borrowed for lovers. Combining an early Christian cemetery with a seventeenth-century church, it remains a place of pilgrimage.

Why it matters

The basilica is a major focus of devotion to Saint Valentine, traditionally identified as a bishop and martyr of Terni. Accounts of his martyrdom and burial belong to the saint’s religious tradition. The church preserves relics venerated as his through successive phases of rebuilding.

What to notice

The crypt preserves an early nucleus of the church. Here the ancient arcosolium altar sits in a vaulted niche directly over the martyr's tomb, the arrangement that pilgrimage has centred on since late antiquity. In the main church, look for the crystal case beneath the high altar holding the reliquary statue of the saint, and the sober Baroque single nave with its stucco decoration and vaulted ceiling. The altar paintings are seventeenth-century and include work by the Flemish painter Lucas de la Haye, by Cavalier d'Arpino and by Luca Polidori. Beside the church, an old convent and a small lapidarium display inscriptions and fragments recovered from the surrounding necropolis, one of Umbria’s important paleochristian burial grounds.

Context and history

The sequence of buildings is unusually well documented. A shrine over the tomb grew into a five-aisled paleochristian basilica; the diocese records that this first church was destroyed by the Goths in the sixth century and rebuilt in the seventh, a date confirmed by a coin of the emperor Heraclius found on the site. The basilica also hosted a moment of European consequence: in 742 Pope Zachary met the Lombard king Liutprand here, a negotiation whose territorial donations helped shape the later Papal States. The present Baroque church was begun in 1606, after the saint's remains were rediscovered in 1605 under papal permission; his body was returned in 1618, and a marble high altar funded by Archduke Leopold of Austria was completed in 1632. The saint's relics, sealed in an ark with a reclining figure in 1630, were moved to the new altar in 2003, the year a fragment of his skull, stolen in 1979, was restored to Terni. The classicising facade was finished only in 1854.