There is a little Zion in the heart of Bologna. It is the basilica of San Stefano, which for more than a thousand years has been known as the ‘sancta Jerusalem Bononiensis’ – Bologna’s holy Jerusalem. You approach along a portico that is topped with a row of beautifully carved heads, all of them bowed as if in prayer.
Where the portico ends the road opens out into a long isosceles triangle, surely the most beautiful of Bologna’s many beautiful piazza
Portico along the triangle
San Stefano is sometimes called ‘le Sette Chiese’, the Seven Churches. If there were every precisely seven – that mystic number – there are now only four.
The backdrop of the Piazza Santo Stefano is the basilica that gives it its name: an interweaving of seven religious buildings that are surprisingly interconnected. According to tradition, San Petronio, the Bishop of Bologna, had the idea of creating a basilica after the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
It was built on top of a temple dedicated to Isis. The buildings that make up the complex are all very old. Because of the numerous restorations in the first decades of the 20th century, the look of the complex has changed from the original “Seven Churches” to four. Despite this, it is still one of the most romantic and interesting monuments in the city.
You enter through the Church of the Crucifix. Of Lombard origin, it dates back to the 8th century. It has a single nave with a raised presbytery reached by a stair. Here is found the 14th century crucifix that gives the church its name.
In the left nave you can admire a sculpture from the 18th century that depicts the “Lamentation over the Dead Christ”.
According to legend, the work was made using playing cards that had been confiscated during the years when gambling was prohibited. The church walls are covered with frescoes telling the story of the martyr St. Stefano. Under the presbytery stair is a splendid crypt. It is divided into five naves by a series of antique columns, each one different from the other. According to legend, one of these is the exact height of Jesus.
On the left of the altar, a small fresco from the 15th century shows the "Madonna of the Snows”. While it is of little artistic merit, it is nonetheless striking.
A low door on the left wall of this church leads into the next – the Holy Sepulchre. This cylindrical edifice, like a tall grain silo, is the site of a Roman temple of Isis that was the first sacred building on the site. One of the Roman columns still stands, a slim marble rod jammed up against a stouter brick-built neighbour. In the middle of the space stands a 1000-year-old mausoleum – a building within a building. It is an exact copy of the tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, or it would be exact if it had not been altered and amended down the centuries. This was the resting-place of Petronius, 5th-century bishop of Bologna and now the city’s patron saint. At the bottom of the structure, like the grate in a fireplace, was a barred window, through which you could peer in to see the grave of Petronius.
The little door of the tomb used to be opened for one week year during which time it was possible to crawl inside and pay one’s respects to the saint’s remains.
According to a curious custom, pregnant women in Bologna would circle the sepulchre thirty-three times, one for each year of Christ’s life. After each turn, they would crawl into the small sepulchre to pray. At the end of the ritual, they would go to the nearby church of Martyrium to pray in front of a fresco of the pregnant Madonna. In 2000 the body of San Petronio was moved to the basilica that bears his name, reunited with his head which was already there. From that point on, the sepulchre was never opened again.
In the church there is also a natural spring that holds very high symbolic value: it represents the River Jordan, where Christ was baptized, an idea also reflected in the seven African marble columns reused in the sepulchre. Of course, in reality the spring already existed when the original temple on the site was dedicated to Isis
A few days ago, on our first visit here, there was a shrouded body lying here
In the last chapel called the Holy Cross or the Martyrium, there is a wood sculpture representing the Adoration of the Magi: it is a nativity scene made up of statues in the round and is the oldest of its kind in the world. It dates from 18th century and was created by an unknown Bologna sculptor. The colour was added a century later
The few surviving frescoes in the church date from the 1300s: one shows St. Ursula with her fellow martyrs,
while the other depicts the pregnant Madonna tenderly stroking her belly. The latter is a favourite among pregnant Bolognese women.
But next door is something more mournful: a horizontal wooden statue of the deceased Jesus. He lies feet foremost, his pierced hands crossed over his abdomen, his head lost in shadow.
the “Courtyard of Pilates”, so named in memory of the place where Jesus was sentenced. The courtyard is surrounded by a Romanesque portico. In the centre stands a stone basin: it came to be called “The Basin of Pilates”. It is a Lombard work from the 8th century with an inscription below the rim.
there is an arch that shelters a 14th-century stone cockerel. It is there to serve as a reminder of Simon Peter’s betrayal: ‘…this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice…’
On the wall nearby there are several tombstones, one with a real pair of scissors in the centre and apparently belonged to a tailor.
And in the nearby cloister the capitals of some of the columns take the form of weird and rather unhappy little men, hunched or crouching or, in one case, clinging to the top of the column like a monkey on a palm trunk. All of these naked homunculi are the work of the Lombards – ‘Longbeards’ – the Germanic people who occupied northern Italy for much of the Dark Ages. They are perhaps the single most appealing thing about basilica of San Stefano.
The Lombards are also responsible for the magnificent brickwork patterns, like a patchwork quilt in shades of terracotta, that make up the walls of Pilate’s Courtyard.
Medieval Cloister. Built on two floors, the cloister is often used for exhibitions: The lower part dates from before 1000, while the upper part is a magnificent example of Roman-Gothic. Some of the column capitals depict horrifying images.
Blooming wisteria and colorful houses on the piazza
"Whether you are a believer or not, you are sure to emerge from San Stefano with a heightened awareness of suffering – the divine redemptive Passion, perhaps, but also the universal fact of human pain, the commonplace inevitability of death. Perhaps the Jerusalem of Bologna has evolved, organically and down the centuries, to guide you on that sobering journey, to lead you on a symbolic pilgrimage to the end of life. If so, that is no bad thing. Because you will at least step back onto the triangular square of San Stefano and be glad to feel the warm Italian sunshine on your face, to breathe the fresh Bolognese air, and to know that to be alive at all is a very wonderful, worthwhile thing".
No comments:
Post a Comment