In one of the chapels there is a trapdoor: below it opens the small hypogeum church dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, the oldest core of the building, where a fresco recalls the visit of Pope Urban II to Matera in 1093. The church of San Francesco d'Assisi you see today is baroque, and it stands on the square of the same name right in the centre; the Franciscan dedication is traced back to a visit by the saint that some chroniclers place in 1218.
What to see
The original structure dates from the first half of the 13th century, was enlarged in the 15th and took its present shape in the 18th, when Vito Valentino and Tommaso Pennetta built the baroque facade. Three statues stand along the top: the Immaculate Virgin at the centre, Saint Francis and Saint Anthony at the sides.
Inside there is a single nave, with a flat painted ceiling and chapels opening along the flanks. The nave ends in a quadrangular apse, introduced by a pointed arch and covered with a groin vault. Behind the high altar, against the back wall, sits the choir gallery: its parapet is made of the panels of a 15th-century polyptych, nine tempera paintings on wood attributed to Lazzaro Bastiani. Above it stands the pipe organ by Fratelli Ruffatti, built in 1955 and modified by the same firm in 1978, with electric action and 22 stops on two manuals and pedal.
Visiting
You go in from piazza San Francesco, one of the busiest squares in Matera, and the sequence to follow is chronology in reverse: first the baroque of the facade and the nave, then the fifteenth-century polyptych on the choir gallery, and last the descent into the hypogeum of Saints Peter and Paul, reached through the trapdoor set in a chapel.
Our editors' tip
Do not stop at the high altar: turn towards the back wall and count the panels of the polyptych, there are nine of them, and look at them closely before your eye climbs to the organ. Then ask about the trapdoor: going below the floor of the baroque church and standing in front of the fresco of 1093 is the shortest way to grasp how many centuries are stacked up here.