Above the white stone doorway, inside the round arch, a winged lion is carved in relief. It is not generic decoration: it is the signature of whoever laid the first stone. Agnone's mother church was begun by Venetians in the 11th century and dedicated to the patron saint of the Serenissima, and that lion has stayed put while everything around it changed.
The building stands on the easternmost point of the old town, on the rocky spur of Largo Carlo Alberto di Savoia, a hill dropping sheer to the valley; it went up together with the San Marco quarter, on the northern side of the settlement. Enlarged in the following century, the church appears in documents in 1114. In the fifteenth century it became a royal archpriestship, entrusted to senior and deserving priests. Then came the Baroque, which remade the interior from top to bottom, and the earthquake of 1805, which wrecked much of Molise and forced a restoration of the façade. One last piece of archive trivia: until 1884 this was the only church in Agnone with a baptismal font, and only the growth of the population led to the others being equipped.
What to see
The plan is an irregular quadrilateral and the façade is all but crushed by the tower-like belfry, which ends in an onion spire of the Neapolitan school. From the Romanesque phase the portal survives, its lunette once frescoed. Inside: a single nave with no transept, deep side chapels for the altars, a coffered ceiling of Venetian Baroque taste with polychrome decoration, and a run of half-sunk columns finishing in Corinthian capitals. The high altar sits beyond three Gothic-Venetian arches, under a seventeenth-century canvas of St Mark writing the Gospel.
The side altars tell the town's story better than any guidebook. The altar of St Anne keeps a nineteenth-century painted ex voto commemorating the earthquake of 1805, which struck on the night of 26 July, the saint's feast day. Beside the smaller door is the relic of St Theodora, co-patron of Agnone with St Cristanziano; the altar of the Madonna del Rosario is full-blown Baroque, with flowers, leaves and cheering putti; the recently built Sacred Heart altar holds the wooden statues of St Mark and St Raphael. The oldest carvings, though, are fourteenth-century: a St Nicholas and a Madonna and Child.
Our editors' tip
Look at the outside wall before you go in. The restoration carried out by Silverio Giovannucci for the Soprintendenza left the building's layers on show: medieval panels walled into the front, pointed arches in the apse area, masonry of local stone laid in irregular courses. It is the quickest way to grasp that this is not one church but four or five stacked on top of each other. And from the edge of the terrace, the highest and most exposed spot in the old centre, the valley opens up all at once.