Italy’s churches
Italy has an abundance of churches, from the large and ostentatious to the small and reserved.
Christmas is the biggest festival of the year for Christians, and religious or not, the beauty of churches is something we can all admire.
I felt heartened when visiting some of the churches in Italy that, along with nuns and priests roaming the aisles, there were sightseers like me and often Muslim women with their families, demonstrating how universal the interest is in these amazing buildings.
When entering any of the more famous cathedrals in Italy you now have to be scanned and searched. Terrorism in Europe has caused an immense scaling-up of police and the military, so much so that in Rome they often cordon off the surrounding streets to traffic.
I choose three churches to note in this review, spread over Italy and as diverse as the various regions of the country.
Sienna’s Cathedral must be one of the world’s most wonderful. In part it is just how it rises up out of the city, which is coloured, as any oil painter will know, a rich brown-red.
The church is a sparkling pink-white, so completely dazzles when you round one of the tiny streets that lead into it.
The Sienna Duomo was started in 1229, and like most of the churches, took hundreds of years to complete – around the end of the 14th century.
But this starting date is important as the ‘‘bones’’ of the layout took the predominant style of Romanesque with the dome and wider, more airy spaces. All the further embellishments were then made to fit, so much so that even when the Archbishop’s Palace was built on the back in 1718-23, it still looks harmonious.
The most frenzied building period was when Sienna was at its peak of power, giving it a strong medieval flavour seen in the giant horizontal striped internal columns, the rich, ornate carving of the figures that decorate it inside and out the ceiling vaults with golden stars on a blue sky and the astounding marble inlaid floors using giant slabs, some with complex patterning, others engraved.
It has a lively whimsical quality that differentiates it from the darker, narrow Gothic. This essence of the medieval, of flamboyance and elegance, sums up the time of knights, processions and frivolity.
Milan’s Duomo couldn’t be more different.
It is colossal, one of the world’s largest, and sits overlooking a huge square. It is made of pure white Candoglia marble originally quarried quite a distance away, loaded in 100-kilogram lots on to barges and shipped in on canals, now turned into streets. It absolutely drips with ornamentation and at first glance, almost looks as if a mass of icicles are sitting magically on an enormous snow block.
The first stone was laid in 1386, with the designs for a cathedral in the international Gothic style – even then the Milanese were fashion conscious. The central nave and aisles were completed in the 1400s. Later, a new family took over the project and, deciding it needed to have some of its own presence, added five more spans onto the building.
This happened again in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a further three spans resulting in its slightly odd, block-like shape. In the 19th century, Napoleon, Milan’s ruling leader of the time, pushed completion and tried to rein in cost by adopting the neoclassical ‘‘Roman’’ style, finally finishing the facade. Thus it was more or less complete in the 1880s, having taken some 500 years, although the bronze doors were only put in as late as the 1950s. There is a smattering of carvings both inside and out of the building – processions of saints and martyrs, some 150 Gargoyles for water collected from the vast roof to trickle out of. You can walk along the roof line, providing a chance to see the figures up close and to look out over the square at Milan. The interior of the church is curiously dark, the stone appearing grey in spite of the ample stained glass and white and pink inlaid floors. It is the outside that is most worth consideration, an eccentric, over-laden monolith that gleams in the sun.
My last consideration is intentionally a smaller, largely unknown church. The small, local identities are my favourite of all, simplicity of scale and detail leading to spaces that seem to have a personable and resonating harmony.
Rome has literally hundreds of these scattered around the city, mixed in and a part of local areas. These buildings you happen upon and can just causally and quietly walk in to sit and enjoy the cool quiet, no-one seeming to mind a foreign presence. One of the ‘‘locals’’ in the area where I stayed was a church called Saint Stefano Rotondo, with its roots as a Roman building and layers upon layers of repairs and upgrades.
These stone remains are what much of Rome seems to be partially made up of, built around, perched on or situated near as abandoned debris.
In the small church there are medieval frescos painted on top. This particular building never got much of a makeover in the Baroque period so it has a quiet, understated beauty. It retains a certain shabbiness that adds to its humble appeal.