Chiesa di San Domenico

Chiesa di San Domenico rises in the city centre with a brick façade, a rose window and slender terracotta pinnacles. It is the city’s only true Gothic building, shaped for the Dominican community established here from the mid-thirteenth century.

The present church was built between 1334 and 1335, then enlarged in 1351. Its original four naves became three when an eighteenth-century street realignment removed the rightmost nave and raised the floor by 60 centimetres. Between 1906 and 1909, Alfredo d’Andrade and Riccardo Brayda restored the medieval appearance with pointed windows, interior columns and a renewed apse. Fourteenth-century frescoes survive in the Cappella delle Grazie: the Maiestas Domini, the Annunciation, Saint Thomas Aquinas presenting the donors and apostles with identifying cartouches.

A detached fresco of Duke Amedeo IX, attributed to Antoine de Lonhy and dated after 1472, stands on a side altar. The church also retains a mid-fifteenth-century bell tower, though bombing on 13 July 1943 damaged both the roof and campanile. Look up at the façade’s small terracotta pinnacle, where the twentieth-century Gothic revival leaves its clearest mark.