Chiesa di San Francesco

The Franciscan church of Terni, begun in 1265 beside its own piazza, grew from a single Gothic nave into a tall three-aisled hall. Its prize is the Paradisi chapel, where Bartolomeo di Tommaso painted a vast Last Judgment in the mid-fifteenth century, among the most ambitious fresco cycles in Umbria.

Why it matters

Terni's medieval core survives in fragments around the industrial city, and this church is the largest of them. Its architecture records two centuries of Franciscan building practice, from the austere single-nave plan of 1265 to the Renaissance apse and patrician chapels of later decades. Its painted chapel belongs to a small group of Italian Last Judgment cycles that show, wall after wall, how late medieval Italians imagined the end of the world: risen bodies, weighing of souls, paradise and hell rendered at architectural scale. That the cycle survived the Second World War bombing that gutted so much of Terni makes it more precious still, and the church's own damage and repair are part of the city's modern history.

What to notice

The church began as a single Gothic nave with transept, ribbed cross vaults and polygonal apse; it was later enlarged with three aisles, a Renaissance apse and monumental side chapels. The facade preserves the pointed medieval portal and oculus from the first building campaign. The bell tower has double and quadruple lancet windows above a polychrome ceramic string course. The chapel built to guard a silver tabernacle containing a relic of the Holy Cross shows the church's relic traffic, while the Paradisi chapel carries the main event: a frescoed Last Judgment commissioned by Monaldo Paradisi from the Foligno painter Bartolomeo di Tommaso, spreading across three walls with prophets and seated readers on the entrance arch. The altarpiece made here for the Franciscans by Piermatteo d’Amelia now hangs in the city’s picture gallery.

Context and history

The Franciscans arrived in Terni within living memory of the saint, and the church begun in 1265 followed Assisi-derived models in a reduced urban key. Building ran in campaigns: the original body was complete within a few decades, the campanile took its present form in the fifteenth century with bifore and quadrifore, and the chapels of leading families, including the Paradisi, multiplied along the aisles. Around the middle of the fifteenth century Bartolomeo di Tommaso, the most prominent Umbrian painter of his generation, frescoed the family chapel of Monaldo Paradisi with the Second Coming; the Treccani biography treats the cycle as his most important surviving work. Later centuries baroquefied the interior, and a modern restoration, promoted after the church was declared a national monument through the intervention of the scholar Luigi Lanzi, stripped much of that decoration away. The church was gravely damaged by wartime bombing, repaired after 1945 under the Salesians who still serve it, and raised to the rank of sanctuary in 2004; the bell tower, hurt in the 2009 earthquake, was consolidated by 2015.