This church was begun in 1233, a few years after the death of saint Dominic, and may be one of the first of the order. It had three aisles, but today only the apse and the right arm of the transept remain: the rest was pulled down in 1932 to make room for a women's academy of physical education, and what you visit is a stump.
What to see
Inside is the funerary monument of cardinal de Braye, carved by Arnolfo di Cambio at the end of the thirteenth century: one of the most important tombs of the Italian middle ages, with the figure of the dead man under a canopy and statues drawing the curtains aside. It is the piece worth the journey, and it stands in a halved church whose name few people know.
Here too is kept the chair from which Thomas Aquinas gave his theology lessons in the years he lived in Orvieto, in the papal court's train. Under the church is the Petrucci chapel, cut into the tufa, with a central plan and niches: a Renaissance work in an underground room, which is rare.
Visiting
The church is in piazza XXIX Marzo, five minutes from the cathedral; free entry with short hours, and the underground chapel is seen only on particular occasions or on request. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Go out and look at the flank of the building: you can see the cut, the point where the church was sawn away. The nave reached to where the building next door now stands. In the twentieth century demolition was done like this too, to make a gymnasium, and this wall is the clearest document of that season.
