The church of Santa Maria Maggiore, also called San Francesco after the Franciscan friars who serve it, stands in Tivoli in piazza Trento, in the Santa Croce district, next to Villa d'Este. Legend attributes its building to Pope Simplicius on the remains of the house of the historian Sallust; studies date it to the Carolingian age, when the Benedictines of Farfa are thought to have raised the first church and convent in the ninth century.
What to see
Originally the entrance was on the opposite side. Around 1130 the church was perhaps enlarged and the entrance moved to where it is today, turning a building into a portico; at the end of the thirteenth century the rose window, the Gothic marble portal of the nave and the frescoed choir were added. In 1392 the sculptor Angelo da Tivoli made the late Gothic portal under the portico with the tabernacle above it, commissioned by the militia captain Nicola Brunelli. In the narthex there is also a fifteenth-century marble tabernacle with a fresco of the Madonna and Child among angels from the second half of the thirteenth century. The church has three naves, with chapels only on the left, and in the nave a thirteenth-century Cosmatesque floor commissioned by a devout woman named Maria, wife of Leone Bonini. The bell tower was built between 1590 and 1602.
In the right aisle is a wooden Crucifix attributed to Baccio da Montelupo; on the left the chapel of Saint Francis has frescoes by the school of the Zuccari and a panel of Saint Anthony almost certainly by Antoniazzo Romano. The presbytery was built between 1577 and 1582 for Cardinal Luigi d'Este, and at its centre is the tombstone of Cardinals Ippolito, Luigi and Alessandro d'Este: Ippolito II, who turned the old monastery into the villa, is buried here. On the high altar of 1592 is the panel of the Madonna Avvocata, attributed to Jacopo Torriti, a painter of the late thirteenth century. On the left the triptych signed by Bartolomeo da Siena, of about 1430, with the Virgin between Saint Francis and Saint Louis of Toulouse, shows the Annunciation when closed; on the right a wooden altarpiece with the enthroned Virgin among saints is attributed to the school of Luca Signorelli or to a pupil of Monaldo Trofi.
Visiting
The church is in piazza Trento and is the seat of the parish of Santa Croce. Opening hours should be checked with the friars.
Our editors' tip
According to some, the right aisle once had chapels that were destroyed to widen the entrance to the Este palace; in fact they never existed, as the medieval masonry of the outer wall showed, visible from the courtyard of Villa d'Este until the latest restoration.
