Saint Giovanni (Pieve Vecchia)

Via della Pieve Vecchia, 567, 55100 Lucca LU

The current church of San Giovanni in Santa Maria del Giudice was built during the 12^th century on the remains of a small early medieval church dedicated to Santa Cristina and mentioned in documents as early as 918. Later the church, which became a baptismal parish, assumed the usual dedication in San Giovanni Battista, then prevailed over the first and moved to the new building. In the meantime, probably at the end of the 11th century, a new church - for this still known as "Pieve Nuova" - was built in the town and dedicated to the Virgin and only a few years later the Pieve Vecchia was reconstructed: it took place in the 1160, as we can see from the epigraph placed on the façade architrave, and referred to the previous Pieve Nuova - starting from the three-nave inscription with a single apse illuminated by single-light windows - with some significant variations. The most obvious of them, visible from the outside, is given by the presence on the façade of a discreet but insistent two-color effect obtained thanks to the use of green serpentine and used both for the archivolts of the blind arches of the two orders, and for the arch of the portal and of the oculus opened in the tympanum: it is an element coming from the example of the cathedral of Pisa but which had particular fortune, more than in the Lucca area, especially in the Pistoia area. Inside the church is divided into three naves by columns all with Romanesque capitals with smooth leaves with the exception of two of them, surmounted by Roman capitals reused, as is customary in the most important of the sacred buildings of this era in the Pisan area -lucchese; classical echoes can also be found in the abraso architrave of the façade portal, with vegetable spirals including rosettes. Traces of the foundations of the primitive church of Santa Cristina have been found in the right aisle - together with the probable layout of a 13^th century baptismal font - just as the bell tower is surely from the previous church: it rises adjacent to the church but not welded with it and it presents, in addition to a more archaic masonry with small, roughly square drafts referable to the eleventh century, early medieval decorative motifs on the brackets that support the frames. The bell tower collapsed in its upper half during the seventeenth century and was then rebuilt. A substantial restoration work carried out using the original medieval materials, however, was also carried out on the right side of the church in the 1960s.