For four centuries it was taken for a Roman temple: Palladio drew it believing it ancient, Piranesi engraved it, Byron put it in Childe Harold, and all the travellers of the Grand Tour stopped on the Via Flaminia to see the little temple on the water of the Clitunno, the river of the springs that Pliny the Younger described with temples and villas all around. Instead it is a church, San Salvatore, built between the seventh and eighth centuries by the Lombards of the duchy of Spoleto with pieces of Roman buildings dismantled nearby and with columns, capitals and inscriptions carved on purpose to look ancient: a fake of thirteen hundred years ago, so well made that since 2011 it has been a World Heritage Site with the other places of Lombard power in Italy.
What to see
The façade, first of all, with the four Corinthian columns between two pillars, two smooth and two spiral-fluted, the pediment with the cross among acanthus scrolls, and on the architrave the inscription in perfect Roman capitals: Holy God of the angels who made the resurrection. The other two, on the sides, were lost when in the eighteenth century the side porches were dismantled and the columns sold; the access stairs remain. Below, the chamber in the base, which coincides with the remains of an older pagan building.
Inside, the barrel-vaulted cella, eleven metres long in all, and at the end the aedicula with small columns framing the apse: on the wall the seventh-century frescoes, the Saviour between Saints Peter and Paul, two angels in medallions and the jewelled cross, painted like the icons of Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome and of Sinai, among the oldest in Umbria. In the wall of the apse the box of marble slabs, perhaps a tabernacle or a relic of the cross. Outside, the river passing below, the old mill and, a kilometre upstream, the Springs of the Clitunno with the swans and the transparent water that Carducci sang.
Visiting
The little temple is at Pissignano, on the Via Flaminia between Spoleto and Foligno, with a small car park; it is a state museum with a modest ticket and short hours, often with a midweek closing day, to check beforehand: it is visited in twenty minutes. The Springs of the Clitunno, separately, have their own entrance and ticket. Spoleto is ten kilometres away, and the basilica of San Salvatore, the other Lombard monument of the UNESCO site, is the natural next stop.
Our editors' tip
Read the inscription on the architrave before going in and think that whoever carved it, in a century we call dark, could make Roman letters better than the Romans of his own time. Then go to the Springs and sit where the water comes out of the gravel: Pliny saw oracles there, Carducci nymphs, and the little temple, seen from there, becomes again what everyone wanted it to be.