Campi, a hillside fortified village founded in 1288 on the old road linking Norcia and Visso, built Sant'Andrea as its parish church in the fourteenth century. The money came from the Universitas Campli Castri — the community of villagers itself — which kept the right of patronage; the church answered to the abbey of Sant'Eutizio until 1493, when it gained parish status and the community began appointing its own priest, later confirmed by the bishop.
The earthquake of October 2016 hit it hard: the facade and the Renaissance portico collapsed, together with the fourteenth-century town gate the church leaned against, and roughly half the roof came down, gutting the interior as far as the first central pillar.
What to see
The most theatrical feature was the sixteenth-century hanging portico, triangular in plan and framed by five arches. The pointed left portal carried the cross-bearing lamb of the Benedictine order, and its wooden doors bore the carved date 1570. Beneath the portico roof, a fresco showed an aged Saint Andrew holding up the village he protects, set above a Roman funerary inscription of the first century BC from the mausoleum of the gens Entedia — walled in upside down by fourteenth-century workmen who could not read.
The apse end still stands, braced by the massive bell tower with four openings and three bells. The church's three finest works — a painted Cross of 1241-42 by the Spoleto artist known as Petrus pictor, a fifteenth-century polyptych by Giovanni Sparapane, and a 1.4-metre wooden statue of the seated Saint Andrew holding a model of Campi — had been moved away for safekeeping back in the 1970s and are now in the Diocesan Museum in Spoleto.
Visiting
Campi was among the villages of the Castoriana valley worst hit by the 2016 earthquake, and access to the church area depends on the state of the reconstruction works — check locally before climbing up. Even from a distance, though, the surviving bell tower and the profile of the hillside village make the medieval layout easy to read, the church once forming a single block with the southern town gate.
Our editors' tip
The most rewarding way to see Sant'Andrea today is a detour to Spoleto, where the Diocesan Museum keeps the thirteenth-century Cross, Sparapane's polyptych and the statue of the saint cradling his village in one hand. Seeing them there, knowing where they came from and what awaits their return, completes any journey between Norcia and the valley of Campi.