Santa Maria della Pieve

Description:

• This 12th-century church is Lombard Romanesque architecture at its most beautiful, with a craggy, eroded facade of stacked arcades in luminous beige stone. The spaces between the columns of the arcades get narrower at each level, which, along with the setting on a narrow street, only adds to the illusion of great height. The occasional carved column was mixed in; look for the human telamon in the top row. The fat 36m (118-ft.) bell tower "of the hundred holes," with its bifore windows (mullioned windows with two lights), is a 1330 addition. The medieval reliefs lining the main doorway depict the months of the year, including the two-faced pagan god Janus sitting in for the month of January (named after him).

  The arches in the interior are just starting to get plucked to Gothic pointiness, and dozens of windows light the place. On the high altar above the raised crypt is a 1320 polyptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints -- all wearing gorgeously worked fabrics -- by Sienese master Pietro Lorenzetti. In the crypt, with its carved medieval capitals, is a 1326 reliquary bust by Aretine goldsmiths Peter and Paul; inside are the remains of Arezzo's patron saint, St. Donato, a local bishop martyred in the 5th century.

• © Frommer's 2012

Awards:

Frommer's

•  Recommended 2010