The church of San Marco Evangelista is the parish church of Buttigliera Alta. Nobody knows when the town's first church went up, but the report of the apostolic visit of 1584, made by Angelo Peruzzi, bishop of Sarsina, describes it as dedicated to Saints Mark and Sebastian and with a floor of beaten earth. It was raised to parish status in 1595, and the patronage went to the family of the counts Carron, the same who shortly afterwards would make Buttigliera an autonomous municipality.
What to see
The front is divided by a string course into two registers. The lower one is a portico of three arches, with stone reinforcements at the sides; the upper, taller, has two corner pilasters and a window, and is decorated with pilaster strips painted in trompe l'oeil and with five frescoes showing as many saints. At the top stands the triangular pediment, with two vases at the sides and a cross at the centre. Behind rises the bell tower, put up in 1718.
Visiting
Inside there is a single nave, rectangular in plan and barrel-vaulted, onto which four side chapels open with their minor altars, canvases and sculptures. At the end the presbytery is raised two steps, covered by a sail vault and closed by a square apse. Between 1978 and 1980 the presbytery was rearranged, with the partial replacement of its furnishings.
Our editors' tip
The church went up in two stages, and it shows. The first stone of the new parish church was laid in 1653 at the wish of Guglielmo Francesco Carron di San Tommaso, and the building was finished twenty years later, in 1673; but barely ten years after that it was decided to enlarge it, and from that second campaign, closed in 1712, came the presbytery, the transept, the barrel vault and the front you see today. Looking at the portico and the frescoes, you are looking at the second thought, not the first.