The pieve of San Gennaro stands in the village of the same name in Capannori, in the province of Lucca. It is documented from 980 and has the Romanesque look of the twelfth century, though altered over time. It has three aisles divided by columns and once had three apses, of which only the left one remains; the bell tower was rebuilt in 1840.
What to see
Much of the façade has been rebuilt, but the cubic capitals of the doorway and the upper loggia are original. Along the north side runs a row of hanging arches on corbels with varied decoration, repeated on the apse corbels and, inside, on the capitals of the two columns on the entrance wall; those of the left aisle are cubic, with strongly geometric abstract figures. In the right aisle is the marble pulpit of 1162.
The church has become famous for a terracotta statue of the Archangel Gabriel that the scholar Carlo Pedretti, director of the Hammer Center for Leonardo studies, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: according to Pedretti, Leonardo may have stopped at San Gennaro during his studies on channelling the Arno, and one of his maps from those years shows the church and the surrounding landscape.
Visiting
In 2019, after restoration at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, the statue was displayed with a tentative attribution to Leonardo, but assigned with reasonable confidence to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. Opening times should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
According to scholars, the San Gennaro angel is part of the small group of works from which to investigate Leonardo as a sculptor, together with a Madonna and Child in the Victoria and Albert Museum and a small equestrian bronze in Budapest.
