Parish Church of Santa Maria

The pieve (parish church) of Santa Maria stands a short distance from the present town of Cavriana, on a small hill spur bordering the Mantuan plain. The church is currently dedicated to the Immaculate Virgin. Information on the origins of this monument is scarce and uncertain. According to scholars, the pieve was begun in 1195, but the documents make it possible to bring forward the dates for the existence of a place of worship with a baptismal font, already called a pieve (diploma of Conrad II of 1037, in which the words “ pieve di Capriana ” appear). Other documents, also of the same century, list the pieve of Cavriana among the places under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Mantua (documents of 1045 and 1055, in which Emperor Henry III specifies that the church is among the private possessions of the bishop of Mantua). According to other hypotheses, this early church was built by the monks of the powerful abbey of San Benedetto di Leno, owners of a manorial estate located here, with material produced by a nearby kiln (recently restored by Enel, although not yet open to the public), already active in Roman times. Evidence in favour of this view is said to have been found on a Roman tile set into the outside wall of the church, bearing two inscriptions: “M D N” (which should mean “ Maria Dominae Nostrae ”) and “M C X” (which would indicate the year of consecration, namely 1110). The pieve of Santa Maria was, in any case, the first parish church of Cavriana. In the 14th century, perhaps at the wish of a wealthy local lord, the church was enriched with new architectural features, such as a new portal and the statue of the Madonna della Misericordia of 1332. Further restoration work was then carried out in the following centuries (in the 16th century, alterations to the windows, rebuilding of the wooden portal and a masonry enclosure for the cemetery area). In the 17th century (1676) the pieve lost its prerogatives as a baptismal church in favour of the new parish church, called Santa Maria Nova in Castello. Also in this period, probably as a result of the new religious functions assigned to the building (it had become a conventual church attached to the Company of the Holy Crucifixion), work began on rebuilding the apse area. Around the middle of the 18th century work was undertaken to build the choir. Two side chapels were also added. On that same occasion the portal was rebuilt and the apse area demolished. The bell tower of this ancient pieve is thought to be 14th-century work, contemporary with the present west portal (1332). and with the marble statue of the Madonna della Misericordia, now placed inside, in the centre of the main apse. In the Baroque period (18th century) the bell tower was restored again, and it was brought back to its present form in 1953-55. The building, now visible on all four sides, has a rectangular plan ending to the east in three semicircular apses, the two side ones of equal size and the central one larger (see photo plan) , while to the west it has a simple gabled roof. The roofs are covered with curved tiles. On the south-east corner, within the perimeter of the church, rises the bell tower, without openings except for the bell chamber, which is lit on all four sides by as many two-light windows supported in the centre by a composite brick column, surmounted by a white stone crutch capital projecting rather far from the wall surface. The top is formed by four corner pinnacles and crowned by an inverted cone. The arches of the two-light windows have a moulded frame. The materials used in this building are of the same type on all four sides and consist mostly of brick of various kinds: bricks of different sizes predominate, assembled in horizontal or vertical bands or in herringbone pattern, in uneven alternation with fragments of curved tiles, mostly laid in herringbone pattern (recognisable by their slight curvature). These bricks vary considerably in the type of sandstone used; some are blood red, others more pinkish and others still take on various shades of ochre, down to yellowish. The binding consists of thick layers of mortar between one and two centimetres thick (see photo north side) . The only part of the building of different composition is the foundation base, visible all along the perimeter to a height of about thirty centimetres above the present ground level, except for a stretch of the north side near the apse area, where the foundation masonry, for a length of a couple of metres and a height of just over one and a half metres, stands out for its ashlars and cobbles of various materials, including light-coloured stones and brown porphyries, all set in thick layers of mortar. The three massive apses to the east, where the fragmentation of the masonry, with its varied arrangements of bricks and unworked cobbles, can best be observed, have, quite unusually, no openings at all, and neither does the front of the end of the nave above them. The two small side apses are divided vertically by three pilasters, including those at the junction with the central apse, linked at the top by pairs of small blind rampant brick arches, four in each sector. The eaves, barely projecting, are made of horizontal bands of small red and grey bricks. In the central apse there are six pilasters, including the two against the end of the nave, with twelve small arches, of which the last two at the northern and southern ends fall within the space occupied by the hemicycles of the small side apses, almost against the roofs. As the only decorative feature, bricks are set into the second-to-last pilaster on the right to create a geometric pattern (see photo central apse) . The central pilaster of the north apse, too, at the level of the small arches, shows a sort of pseudo-spatial breakdown formed by small bricks laid crosswise, interspersed with a brick set vertically (see photo small north apse) . Also on the east side, where the south slope of the roof meets the elevation of the bell tower, an upturned curved tile projects, supported by a curled iron hook, perhaps serving as a gutter. As for the long sides of the building (see photo south side) , to lighten the compactness of the masonry, besides the uneven alternation of horizontal and herringbone courses of brick and other unworked cobbles, sixteen pilasters (excluding the projecting corner frames) are inserted to punctuate the spaces along the whole perimeter, again made mostly of brick, projecting about ten centimetres from the walls and varying in width from twenty-five to thirty centimetres, linked, just below the roofline, by pairs of projecting small blind arches made of small bricks supported by undecorated terracotta corbels (only one small bay on the south side is divided by three small arches instead of two). Other examples of longitudinal articulation, achieved by means of flat pilasters linked by small blind arches, are found both in the Po valley (Santa Maria Maggiore at Lomello, the abbey church of Santa Giustina at Sezzadio) and in other regions [1] . continued >>> [1] at least two Romanesque buildings in the province of Lucca: the pieve of San Gennaro at Capannori, where the north side wall has pilasters linked at the top by three moulded small blind arches, a building chronologically assigned to the late 11th-early 12th century, although of much older origin (it is first mentioned in 980, but a religious building is already known to have existed in the 9th century), and Santa Margherita di Tassignano, first mentioned in 899 and rebuilt between the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century: the lower order of the façade and part of the side walls remain original. On the south side wall the pilasters are linked by pairs of moulded small arches. But the monument that comes closest in its architectural layout to the pieve of Cavriana is the church of San Geminiano at Vicofertile (province of Parma), where pilasters linked by pairs of small blind arches occur not only on the side walls but also on the façade, as at Cavriana (historians date the rebuilding of the Parma monument to the 12th - early 13th century, on a pre-existing building).