The church of San Francesco is a religious building in Vigevano, in the diocese of Vigevano, on the street that bears its name.
What to see
It was built in 1379 outside the city walls, a year after the convent of the Friars Minor; it was smaller, oriented differently and occupied the space of the present transept. It was completely rebuilt, with a change of axis, between 1465 and 1470, and the bell tower was finished in 1475. In 1847, to widen via San Francesco, the chapel of the Immaculate Conception, built in 1494 to a design by Donato Bramante, was demolished.
Between 1847 and 1856 a «restoration» transformed the interior into the Neo-Gothic style, with vaults in place of exposed trusses, and had the roof raised, as a consequence of raising the floor to street level. Between 1891 and 1903 the architect Moretti restored the Lombard Gothic design of the façade, raising it by a few metres to line it up with the raised roof: the small eighteenth-century entrances at the sides of the portal were removed, the two Gothic windows lengthened, the frame of the round window completed, the window remade larger than the fifteenth-century one, and the pinnacles rebuilt. The sides were later restored too, bringing the façade of the transept back to its old form.
Visiting
The church is on via San Francesco, in Vigevano. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check them.
Our editors' tip
On via San Francesco, after the portal on the right-hand side, is a Baroque ossuary called the «chiesetta dei morti», the little church of the dead.
