The six columns
An intact Corinthian front in a medieval square.
Berthold Werner โ Public domain ยท Rippitippi โ Public domain ยท trolvag โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China โ CC0
**A complete Roman temple front of six columns, with a Baroque church behind it** โ on Assisi's main square. Built in the **1st century BC** as a Roman temple, โ **it was never demolished**: **it was converted into a church** in the 16th century โ **so its front survives entire**, **with a Baroque interior built behind it**. โ **The result is strange and instructive**: **six Corinthian columns, a stair, a railing and a pediment** โ **an intact pagan temple front** in the middle of a medieval town square, โ **and behind the door a gilded 17th-century church interior with no relation to it**. โ **Goethe admired it** in 1786 **and wrote that he went to see it before anything else in Assisi** โ โ **ignoring the Basilica of Saint Francis entirely**. โ **Entry is free and quick.**
An intact Corinthian front in a medieval square.
The column bases below the modern square's surface.
An archaeological site beneath the square, visited for a small fee.
Piazza del Comune, 06081 Assisi, Italy
**Because it became a church โ the most successful survival mechanism in Roman architectural history.** โ **The general rule**: **pagan temples after Christianity's triumph** met one of three fates: **demolition** (as a doctrinal act), **or conversion into a quarry** with their stone and columns looted for other buildings โ โ **which is what happened to most**. โ **The third fate โ conversion**: **the building reused as a church**. โ **And then it becomes protected**: **nobody demolishes a church**, **its stone is not looted**, **and it is maintained because it is in use**. โ **The famous example is the Pantheon in Rome** โ **the best-preserved Roman building in the world**, โ **surviving for the single reason that it became a church in 609**. โ **And here in Assisi**: **the temple became the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva** โ โ **so the front was kept as it was**, being still handsome, imposing and serviceable, **while the interior was demolished and rebuilt in Baroque** to the taste of the age. โ **So the survival was of the shell, not the building.** โ **The lesson is general**: **what finds a new use survives, and what does not becomes a quarry** โ which explains the map of antiquities across all Italy.
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