Chiesa di San Pietro

In southern Italy, Norman builders brought a stern, muscular Romanesque style, of which the Chiesa di San Pietro is a modest but revealing example. The church is a single hall, its original wooden roof replaced in the eighteenth century by a vault that runs the length of the nave, divided into four bays by pilasters. These, like the presbytery walls, are painted to imitate marble. The high altar is a more elaborate affair: brickwork sheathed in scagliola, painted to resemble polychrome stone, supporting two columns with a trabeation and tympanum. The tympanum is decorated with two stucco angel heads, and between the columns sits an 1858 fresco of Saint Peter by Augero da Verolengo. In the apse, a large fresco of the Crucifixion, long hidden under plaster, sits asymmetrically behind the altar, hinting at a vanished companion piece. The south wall’s rectangular windows are seventeenth-century replacements; the apse retains two original splayed Romanesque windows. A side chapel, dedicated in 1486 to the Madonna della tosse, holds a fresco of the Virgin with the Deposition.

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