Discover Basilica of Santa Cristina

The Basilica of Santa Cristina at Bolsena is known above all as the site of a Eucharistic miracle of 1263, the subject of Raphael's Mass at Bolsena in the Vatican palace. It was also the burial place of the martyr Christina of Bolsena.

The façade of Santa Cristina is a seam, and reading it is reading the building. Its three sections front three separate structures: the Renaissance centre belongs to the medieval three-naved church, the bell tower to the left is thirteenth- or fourteenth-century, and the block beyond it is the front of the Cappella Nuova del Miracolo. The sanctuary's own description is that the façade clearly shows, in its junctions, the complex articulation of the interior.

The centre is Florentine, and specifically so. It is conformed as a triumphal arch, with superimposed niches between paired pilasters -- a scheme that points back to a prototype probably devised for the famous 1490 competition for the façade of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, adapted for Bolsena by the sculptor brothers Francesco and Benedetto Buglioni, who worked in the Della Robbia manner. The two portals carry polychrome lunettes; the larger shows the Virgin with her Son and the city's patrons Christina and George, in a composition belonging to the Tuscan Quattrocento tradition. What is missing is the colour: the front lost the polychromy that enriched it in 1637. It had itself replaced a slightly earlier façade in bands of white and grey stone, which the patrons did not like.

Inside, three naves on a Latin cross plan under a trussed roof -- and an interior that reads as bare. The sanctuary is explicit about why: the restoration of 1925-1930, seeking the original forms, destroyed all the late-Baroque superstructures and demolished and rebuilt arbitrarily, losing elements of fundamental importance to the building's history. Frescoes from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century survive, with a polyptych of about 1450 by Sano di Pietro on the high altar. Two chapels open to the right of the nave: the Santissimo Sacramento, with a tabernacle by Buglioni, and one dedicated to Saint Lucy, with fifteenth-century frescoes by Giovanni Andrea de Ferrari and a bust of the saint. To the left of the façade is the late-Baroque outer entrance to the Chapel of the Miracle.

Below all of it the architecture stops being designed. The catacomb level holds an underground basilichetta that began as a small memoria over the tomb in the fourth century and was enlarged into its present form in the tenth, a wide vestibule, the Cappella del Corpo di Cristo and the Cappella di San Michele -- cut and adapted rather than built, in a cemetery that was already there.

The site was a burial ground before it was Christian. The catacomb lies just outside the ancient urban area, about 350 metres from the southern limit of Roman Volsinii, beside a road that is in all probability the ancient Via Cassia -- and in ground that had been used as a necropolis long before. Volsinii itself was a Roman foundation: after the Etruscan city of Velzna was destroyed in 264 BC, where Orvieto now stands, the Romans brought the survivors down the valley and founded a new town, which prospered on the Cassia Vetus and later the Traiana Nova.

The cemetery came first, then the tomb, then everything else. The Christian cemetery was in use from the end of the third century to the first twenty years of the fifth. Christina's remains were translated into it around the middle of the fourth century, and a small monumental memoria rose over the tomb immediately. In the tenth century that was enlarged into the underground basilica now called the Grotta di Santa Cristina. Everything above ground grew outward from the tomb over sixteen centuries -- and, from 1263, from the Miracle.

The medieval church is eleventh-century. Local tradition credits its building to the devotion of Matilda of Canossa and Pope Gregory VII, who is said to have consecrated it in person on 10 May 1078. The sanctuary's own account notes that even setting the traditional figures aside, the eleventh-century date for the present building is reasonably reliable. Trial excavations in 1925, under the columns of the right nave, turned up masonry, white marble column bases, archaeological material and sarcophagi, certainly from an earlier monument -- perhaps a paleochristian one.

The façade is Medici money and a Florentine design, 1493-1495. The patrons were the Community of Bolsena and Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, son of Lorenzo il Magnifico and Perpetual Governor of the Patrimony of St Peter in Tuscia from 1492 to 1513 -- the future Leo X, but a cardinal when this was built. In 1493 the Community put up 400 florins and on 27 July accepted the sculptor Francesco Buglioni in place of his brother Benedetto, who was the real author of the model; by an act of 27 October 1494 Benedetto undertook the upper part and the terracotta figures to be set in it, and the work was finished in the first half of 1495. He stayed in Bolsena until the end of 1497, when in November he delivered an altarpiece for nearby San Lorenzo.

Then the chapel, and the long finish. The Cappella Nuova del Miracolo was built from 1693 between the catacomb and the medieval church. Its front was designed at the end of the seventeenth century by Tommaso Mattei and completed only in 1863, by Virginio Vespignani.

And two campaigns of loss. The façade's polychromy went in 1637. The restoration of 1925-1930, under the architect Gavini and the superintendent Carlo Pieri, set out to recover the building's original forms and in doing so destroyed every late-Baroque superstructure, demolishing and rebuilding arbitrarily; the sanctuary records that many elements of fundamental importance to the building's history were lost in the process. That is why the interior now reads bare.

What happened in 1263?

A Teutonic priest -- later named by tradition as Peter of Prague -- came on pilgrimage troubled by doubts about the real presence. After venerating Christina's tomb he said Mass there, and at the consecration, as he held the host over the chalice, it appeared visibly reddened with blood dripping onto the corporal. He wrapped the species in the corporal and carried them to the sacristy; drops fell on the marble of the floor and the altar steps.

And then?

He went to Orvieto, where Urban IV was staying, and confessed his doubt. The pope sent James, bishop of Orvieto -- accompanied, by legend, by Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio -- to verify it and bring the relics. They met at the bridge of Rio Chiaro, now the ponte del Sole, where the pope had come out processionally with the Orvietan clergy and a crowd waving olive branches. Urban IV received the host and the bloodied linens kneeling, and took them to Orvieto cathedral. Nothing more was ever heard of the priest.

Is that why Corpus Domini exists?

The feast was instituted during Urban IV's stay at Orvieto, by the bull Transiturus de hoc mundo -- on 11 August 1264 for the patriarchate of Jerusalem and on 8 September for the universal Church -- with Thomas Aquinas commissioned to write the office and the Mass, and the date fixed as the Thursday after the octave of Pentecost.

What does the catacomb cost, and when can I get in?

Five euros, three up to 16, free under 7. Opening is 9:00-12:15 and 15:30-18:00, with scheduled catacomb visits on Saturday at 11:45 and Sunday at 16:30. A visit runs once six paying visitors have gathered; groups over 15 must book and can take any slot in opening hours.

Can I take photographs?

Not in the catacombs. Permission comes only from the Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, needs a written request twenty days ahead, and costs 160 euros a day with a fossore present.

How old was Christina?

The sources in use here do not quite agree. The hagiographic legend, whose earliest surviving redaction is from the beginning of the fifth century, makes her the eleven-year-old daughter of Urbanus, a magistrate of the city, who became her persecutor. The sanctuary's catacomb page calls her the twelve-year-old martyr of Diocletian's great persecution at the start of the fourth century. The bones found in the urn were of a body under fourteen.

Who paid for the façade?

The Community of Bolsena and the Medici. The patronage was the Community's together with Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, son of Lorenzo il Magnifico and Perpetual Governor of the Patrimony of St Peter in Tuscia from 1492 to 1513 -- later Pope Leo X, but a cardinal at the time. The Community gave 400 florins in 1493, and the work ran from 1493 to 1495.

Why is the interior so plain?

A restoration of 1925-1930 set out to recover the original forms and destroyed all the late-Baroque superstructures, demolishing and rebuilding arbitrarily. The sanctuary records that many elements of fundamental importance to the building's history were lost with them.