The church has undergone many changes over time.
In Romanesque style, only the apse remained.
It stands in a panoramic position.
• Availability: it is possible to visit the church by using the app Chiese a Porte Aperte and book the free admission, enter and make the visit listening to the narrator (every day from 9:00 to 18:00).
For all information, please refer to the website: www.cittaecattedrali.it
In the San Giovanni valley, today a hamlet of Calamandrana, stood the Romanesque church dedicated to S. Giovanni alle Conche, on top of a low hill.
Church rich in historical events, especially in medieval times, has changed image over the centuries.
The current image of S. Giovanni delle Conche has totally changed compared to the primitive.
In Romanesque style, only the apse remained, which fits into the right side of the current church.
Symmetrically it was built another apse, similar, but smaller and in neo-Gothic style, while a third, much higher, placed to the north, is late Baroque and closes the interior space of the presbytery.
A fourth element, the bell tower with a square plan, volumetrically ties the two apses, Romanesque and late Baroque, to the body of the church. This game of intersections then made the space inside the building almost circular.
Inside the walls are decorated with nineteenth-century frescoes of popular workmanship; the figures that appear in the basin of the Roman apse seem to trace, in the iconography, earlier and more ancient frescoes.
The wall structure of the entire building is brick.
Only in the Romanesque apse we find sandstone blocks: both in the “throat” frame, placed attic, and in the traditional theory of hanging arches, resting on shelves, both in the jambs and false arches, with re-closing rings, of the three small windows.
Subtle geometric decorations are carved on monolithic blocks, in which the arches and the rings have been carved.
Each of the three fields of the apse is punctuated by pilasters that are connected to the hanging arches through small capitals, decorated with very stylized phytomorphic drawings, including a human head.
The bricks and the corners are well filed: this fact and the styling of the mortar beds indicate restoration interventions not far away.
For more information: https://www.beweb.chiesacattolica.it/
