La Terra delle Meraviglie - Agriturismi, Bed&Breakfast, Hotel, Campeggi, Residences | Marche Ascoli Piceno | Sibillini Gran Sasso-Laga

The church is in Marsia, where it rises up on a promontory. The apse side, profiled above road 78 is the only component of the outside which still shows its original configuration intact today. The wall is built entirely in sandstone and contains a semicircular apse.

 Pressing in on the apse two symmetric pairs of single openings can be seen that light the assembly room and the crypt below. The position of the building on the downward slope allows the optimal restructuring on two floors of the presbytery area. The apse is decorated with an under gutter of hanging arches, elegantly subdivided into three sequences by two pilaster strips that support the band of arches themselves and delineate three ample recesses along the wall. The pilaster strips do not reach the ground but stop at the same height as a base fascia along which the crypt develops. Two open windows in the middle of the apse light the assembly room and the crypt itself. Of particular interest is the window in the form of a slit onto the presbytery, amply embrasured and with rectangular framing, suggesting the homology that is typically medieval between a holy building and a bastion of defence.

The old assembly room is connected to the crypt by two side stairs that are still practicable today.  Alongside the left stairs a valuable fragment of a XIV century fresco can be observed.  At the sides of a solemnly dressed Our Lady the two lively, gracious figures of the commissioners are picked out, a woman and a man: they are husband and wife, the woman kneeling, the man standing, both with their hands together and their faces upturned to the Virgin. The miniaturist fineness of their features and the effective depiction of their clothes and hair reveal a delicate and expert hand.

The strong elevation of the crypt, the paving of which is just a little below ground level, gave the presbytery a spectacular effect, with the high entrance wall interrupted in the middle by the stairway that connects to the altar.  However, the raising of the floor in the assembly hall has notably checked this.

The crypt is a place of great charm, completely unchanged by the retouching carried out.  It was discovered in 1934.

To reflect the partitioning of the apse front into three, the area that corresponds to the presbytery above is divided into three naves of six free columns that support twelve cross vaults. The columns are more properly pillars with circular bases, being composed of sandstone rows. The capitals are formed of rectangular limestone blocks flared at the corners. It is a form that juxtaposes in an extremely rough way a decorative practice found in the capitals of roman crypts, where four acanthus leaves are delineated softening the descending corners. In one case the base of a column can be seen that presents, in symmetry, the same conformation of the capital; in the same example it can also be noted that at the join of the trunk four light triangular chasings correspond to the flaring at the base below.

The vaults, divided by supporting arches, form squared spans. The walls are rhythmically and finely marked by half pillars that sustain the supporting arches of the vaults, functioning as springers on the special side wings, to the arches that frame in relief the spans of the walls themselves. In some cases the half pillars are crowned by fine brackets. The accuracy of the construction is united to ingeniousness thanks to the play of the projections and recesses united to the rhythm of the numerous archivolts that frame and divide the space.

The apse calottes of the Church and of the crypt are framed over the font by an arch a double archivolt. Note that at the base of the apse of the crypt the frame of two pilaster strips is highlighted that in the original criteria must have divided the base structure of the calotte into three sections, like the external conformation.

The correspondence between the calottes of the apse, the eurhythmic division of the external wall of the apse itself in clear harmony with the lavish rhythm within the crypt, the symmetry of the openings of the apse font, leave no doubts as to the uniformity of the whole.

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