Travelcast Piceno - Audio & Video Guide per la Provincia di Ascoli Piceno

In one of the two arcades that support the courtyard of Santa Lucia, we can see what was once the public bathhouse. Before making the short walk that takes us to the entrance portal of the church, let us turn around for a moment to glimpse the outline of one of the houses near us. All that remains is a gothic arch that bears an inscription, referring to the year 1481. We also see the traces of another arch, an earlier one with the lintel in decorated terracotta. Now let’s return to the church with its imposing and over-proportioned form.

The construction created the need to raze part of the hill in order to obtain a flat and wide enough space for the building. Furthermore, the construction work was complicated by the presence of water from a spring,  which made it necessary to build a containment wall and a canal which largely succeeded  in containing  the damage provoked by so much humidity. From the dimensions of the building, we can intuit its importance and that of its benefactor. Indeed, the church was built by order of Pope Sixtus V, Felice Peretti, who was born here, in the homes that had previously occupied the same spot, on the day of Saint Lucy, the 13th of December 1521.
The construction of the church was entrusted to Domenico Fontana, the pontifical architect. Record of the original project is in the bronze medal exhibited in the Sistine Museum of Grottammare, at the Church of San Giovanni, where we can see a building with a façade that is divided into two floors, preceded by a grand staircase. The church was created as a sort of mausoleum with a lower church in the form of a Greek cross and an upper church with a Latin cross plan. The entrance we now see could only have been the lower church, conceived as a sort of crypt, while for the upper one,  the entrance would have been on the other side, situated on the part that is today at the back of the building. It is a plan that would have put the main entrance, Porta Castello, at the road that leads to the town of Montalto, elevated a Diocese by Sixtus V himself. The building that actually was constructed is quite different from the plan by Fontana. The reason is related to the death of the Pope, which took place several months after the commencement of the work on the church. The laying of the first stone occurred on 17 April 1590 and on the 27th of August of the same year Sixtus V died, after only five years of his papacy.
With his death, the work yard was blocked and only by the will of the Pope’s sister, Camilla Peretti, did the work continue.
Walking up this short incline that takes us to the portal of the church, one may read, incised on the architrave, the dedication of the building to Saint Lucy on behalf of the sister of Sixtus V. The coat of arms of the Peretti family, with a lion that holds the branch of a pear tree in its paw, appears on  the gable of the travertine portal, and above it, one sees the papal coat of arms.
Camilla Peretti was forced to spend from the family coffers in order to complete the building as was the wish of her brother. For this reason, the initial plan was scaled back. The head architect of the masons, Bartolomeo Bongianino, son of Giovanni di Castorano, decided to simply bring the work to its conclusion by raising the walls of the perimeter from which the foundation had already been made. The result of this is what we see today, a large, squared building with a Greek cross plan, mounted by an octagonal lantern, which has alongside it on the left, the vaulted bell tower. From the dedication incised on the major bell we know that the building must have been completed two years later, in 1595, and was granted the title of Collegiate Church by Pope Clement VIII.

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