SAINT NICHOLAS’S CHURCH

Click for St. Nicholas's Church

This is the biggest church in the city, built at the beginning of the 1300s. Simple and massive, its shape is elegant and slender, reaching towards the sky. A perfect example of the passage between the robust Romanesque style to the elegant Gothic style. It has a Latin cross diagram and there’s an apsis on each of the naves. It was built mostly from donations by Pope Benedetto XI. Due to the European pandemic known as the “Black Death”, construction was interrupted for a while until the end of the plague. The church was restored in the first half of the 1800s and then suffered bomb damage during the Second World War in 1944.The pillars which support the streamlined wooden ceiling have frescos by Tommaso Da Modena. Each column is embellished by the frescoes like the Chapter of the Dominicans, depicting, inside a niche, the most important representatives of the Order. If you look carefully you can see a monk with glasses, probably their first appearance in art history.