The parish church of Brienza came about because San Martino, the town's first place of worship, had grown too small between the 11th and 12th centuries: a larger one was built up at the castle and dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta. In the 13th century, under Ruggero I, bishop of Marsico Nuovo, it received so many privileges and properties that the parish priest had to be given a steward to manage the estate. Mother church from 1683, it was rebuilt in 1761, and the entrance doorway dates from that work; in 1857 an earthquake cracked both church and bell tower, which was put back up shorter than it had been.
What to see
The façade, facing northeast, is divided by four pilaster strips with Corinthian capitals carrying a triangular pediment. At its centre stands the monumental doorway between two pilasters, under its architrave; above it a niche with the relief of the Virgin of the Assumption and two round-arched windows. On the left a secondary wing adds a smaller entrance and an oculus. The stone bell tower has a square base, one single-light window per side in the belfry and a four-pitched roof.
Inside, three naves separated by piers carrying round arches; above the moulded cornice runs an attic register with the windows, and at the far end the presbytery, closed off by balustrades and by the semicircular apse. Two canvases by Nicola Peccheneda are worth hunting down: the Virgin and Child with Saint Augustine, of 1784, and the Saint Anthony Abbot, of 1797. Four centuries older is the statue of the Virgin and Child, carved in the 14th century.
Visiting
The ceiling is no longer the original one: the boarded ceiling with its eighteenth-century painting of the Assumption was taken down in the twentieth century and replaced by a plastered slab with no decoration. The building was restored after the 1980 earthquake and in 2012 adapted to post-conciliar liturgical rules with the addition of an ambo and an altar facing the congregation. The church belongs to the archdiocese of Potenza-Muro Lucano-Marsico Nuovo, in the pastoral district of Tito-Valle del Melandro. Below the nave there is a crypt, also on three naves: ask to see it.
Our editors' tip
Come back on the third Sunday of September: as the crucifix comes down from Monte Sacrato, a procession leaves this church with Our Lady of Sorrows dressed in black, followed by girls in the same black, to meet her son. The two processions meet at the edge of the town and carry on together from there.