A Roman temple in the heart of Assisi: the temple of Minerva, now a Catholic church

“Eventually we reached what is really the ancient city and, look! That illustrious structure stood before my eyes: the first monument of complete antiquity that I had ever seen.” The writer of these lines was not just any traveler, but perhaps one of the most famous travelers in history: the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who found himself in Assisi on October 26, 1786. And what struck him was the marvelous Temple of Minerva, a splendid testament to ancient art from Roman times that has been preserved almost intact to the present day.

The temple is located in the heart of Assisi, in the Piazza del Comune, which is the main hub of the Umbrian town: in addition to the temple, here are the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, the Palazzo dei Priori, the current seat of the Municipality, the Volta Pinta, and the Torre del Popolo. And in addition, the Town Hall Square probably corresponds to the site where the Roman forum was located in ancient times, that is, the most important area of the Roman city, where all activities were concentrated and where the main public buildings stood. And among the buildings that overlooked what may have been the forum was the temple of Minerva.

The construction of the temple dates from about 40-30 B.C. It was built at the initiative of the two quattuorviri (i.e., the main offices of the municipium of Assisi) Gnaeus Caius Tiron and Titus Caius Priscus, who decided to finance the building of the temple from their own pockets. We derive all this information from the inscription on the pediment, which reads: Cn. T. Caesii Cn. F. Tiro et Priscus IIIIvir. quinq. sua pecun. fecer., or “Gnaeus Caesius Tiron and Titus Caesius Priscus, quinquennial quattuorviri, built at their own expense.” However, it is likely that in ancient times the temple was not consecrated to the goddess Minerva, but to Hercules, as recent discoveries have documented that in ancient Assisi, the cult of Hercules must have been particularly widespread. But that is not all: in fact, a plaque dedicated to Hercules himself was found (it was instead thought to be dedicated to Minerva following the discovery of a female statue).

To describe the building, we might again avail ourselves of Goethe’s words, “a temple of modest size, as befits a small town, but so perfect, so well conceived, that it would be beautiful anywhere [...]. Looking at the facade, I could not say that I admire enough the brilliant logic of the architecture. The order is Corinthian, the spaces between the columns are about twice as large as the columns themselves.” Indeed, the temple, like every building of classical antiquity, shines with its harmony: six Corinthian columns support a triangular pediment with a banded lintel and corbelled and coffered cornice, and make the magnificent marble construction stand out from the stone buildings that surround it and, indeed, lean against the temple.

The Temple of Minerva in Assisi

As we can easily imagine, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the conversion of pagans into Christians, the temple of Minerva was also converted into a Christian church, and such it is even nowadays (in fact, at present the ancient temple has become the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva). The Benedictine monks in fact came into possession of the building as early as the early Middle Ages (probably towards the end of the 6th century), to make workshops, some dwellings and a small church, but they ceded it in 1212 to the municipality, which first used it as its own headquarters, and later, following the transfer of the municipality to the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, it was used as a prison. When its role as a prison also ended, it was left for decades in a state of neglect only to be restored around 1530, and then consecrated, in 1539, precisely as Santa Maria sopra Minerva, all in continuation with the classical tradition: Minerva was goddess of wisdom and Our Lady is also the holder of Christian wisdom.

Passing through the pronaos, that is, the open space between the columns and the entrance to the temple, we are taken to its interior. The latter is the result of considerable interventions dating back to the third decade of the 17th century, when the entire interior was renovated in the Baroque style. Looking at the ceiling, we notice a magnificent frescoed barrel vault, which in the center has a painting depicting the Glory of Saint Philip Neri, a 1760 work by the Marche artist Francesco Appiani, whose other frescoes are also in the church. At the back, the altar echoes the shape of the facade: four Corinthian columns made of terracotta but covered with stucco and gold support a broken pediment, typical of Baroque art. In the middle of the pediment, we notice the God with Angels by the Assisian painter and architect Giacomo Giorgetti, who was also the director of the church’s interior renovations. In the right and left altars, on the other hand, we find, respectively, the Death of St. Andrew Avellino by Antonio Maria Garbi and the Transit of St. Joseph by the important Austrian painter Martin Knoller. Both works date from 1764.

So not only a well-preserved ancient temple, still showing a two-thousand-year-old façade, but also a Christian temple with beautiful works of art inside, showing us how Assisi was artistically vibrant even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries! What do you say? Have we made you want to stay in Assisi? If so, we leave you with a small suggestion for an overnight stay: Hotel La Terrazza. Greetings and see you on your next trip!

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