Chiesa "del Popolo"

In the main courtyard, just past the entrance arch, the Chiesa del Popolo is an awkward customer. Its west-facing facade is pressed so close to the boundary wall that you can barely see it, and any intended drama is thoroughly undone by the plan: a Greek cross that curves, denying the usual frontality. The building now serves as a rice warehouse across two floors. Downstairs, a central octagonal pillar with rectangular ribs supports sail vaults; the chapels have barrel vaults, groined over the entrance and presbytery, and the curved apse a groined semi-dome. Upstairs, the original roof survives, centred on an elliptical dome on painted pendentives. Stucco festoons of fruit crown the pilasters flanking the windows. The upper vaults are punctured in several places, to allow the passage of rice, presumably. A Renaissance church, then, repurposed without ceremony, its architectural ambitions half-hidden, half-erased by the quiet practicality of storage.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.