The churches of Verona are the places of Catholic worship that have been built within the administrative boundaries of the municipality of Verona, evidence of the ups and downs that the city has experienced throughout its history.
History
From the origins to the earthquake of 1117
Of the many buildings that were erected at the dawn of Christianity in Verona, not many vestiges remain; among the first is the early Christian basilica that was built in the fourth century at the present-day Verona cathedral complex, whose archaeological remains still survive and can be admired inside the church of St. Helena, particularly the notable mosaic floors. Other archaeological evidence includes the traces found during some excavations that uncovered a concentric apse in the foundations of the Church of the Holy Apostles..
The oldest building that has come down to us almost intact, on the other hand, is the sacellum of Saints Teuteria and Tosca, adjacent to the apse of the church just mentioned, much of the 5th-century masonry of which has survived: it is a typical Greek-cross building with a small dome covering the cross, a type of building that in the early Christian age was intended to contain the tomb of some important person or, as in this case, of a saint. However, the building has undergone some transformations over time that do not allow it to be admired in its original appearance, particularly because of the addition of some spaces in the 14th century, when it became the funerary chapel of the Bevilacqua family and assumed a square floor plan; nevertheless, the church still retains its early Christian essence.
Also to the same century belong vast portions of the walls of the church of St. Stephen, which underwent, however, some transformations in the early medieval and Romanesque periods; this building, built extra moenia and included in the walls of Verona only later, is particularly important for the history of the Veronese Church, as it was almost certainly an episcopal seat from the end of the fifth century until the bishopric of Annone in the eighth century. It was probably a building preceded by a quadriporticus and with a single-aisle plan ending in an apse; definitely unusual for the single-aisle layout, since most early Christian churches were characterized by three naves, although it finds several examples in other contemporary religious buildings in Lombardy and central Europe.
Numerous churches and monasteries were built in Lombard and Frankish times, buildings mostly known from two important records from that period: the Versus de Verona, a composition in rhythmic prose datable to the reign of Pepin, and the Raterian Iconography, a map that Bishop Ratherius had made around the middle of the 10th century. These important written documents give an insight into which churches were already in existence at that time among which are especially mentioned the church of Santa Maria Matricolare, the baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, the church of Sant'Elena and the church of Santa Maria Antica in the oldest center, then the church of San Giovanni in Valle across the Adige River and the Benedictine monastery of San Fermo in its vicinity. Within the walls the documents also mention the presence of the monasteries of St. Euphemia and the church of St. Lawrence, while outside the walls the monasteries of Saints Nazaro and Celso and St. Mary in Organo, the latter under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Aquileia. All these buildings, some of which were severely damaged by the Hungarian invasion of 932, underwent rather significant transformations in the following centuries, so that few material remains have survived untouched until today..
In the Versus de Verona, moreover, there was the first attempt to describe Verona as a small Jerusalem; with the intention of making the image of the city as close as possible to the ideal of purity of the heavenly Jerusalem, the text attempted to redeem the pagan foundation of Verona by turning great attention to the sacred history of the town.. This parallelism between the two cities was also celebrated several centuries later in the preface to the Statutes of the Municipality of Verona, written in 1450 by Silvestro Lando, a learned humanist, and in the city seal itself approved on February 26, 1474, where the inscription "Verona minor Hierusalem di(vo) Zenoni patrono" appeared. Going back to the early Middle Ages, it was mainly the image of the city that dictated the terms of comparison with Jerusalem, and during the Carolingian Renaissance it was particularly the archdeacon Pacificus who gave impetus to the architectural renewal; it was therefore at that time that it was given the name minor Hierusalem, finding several similarities between the ancient forms of Verona and Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, the Cedron stream flowing outside the walls separates the hills of Calvary from Mount Olivet. Similarly, in Verona, the Adige separates Mount Olivet, where the church of the Holy Trinity stands, from the barren Mount Cavro, where the church of San Rocchetto stands. It was formerly known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and where three crosses stood..
A turning point was the catastrophic earthquake of Verona in 1117, which caused extensive damage to most of the monuments, causing the substantial disappearance from the city of most of the early medieval testimonies; this fact, in turn, left room for a wide diffusion of the Romanesque style, used in the reconstruction of the affected churches.. This event was so crucial for the city that the economic and social crisis that seized it immediately after the earthquake offered a new citizen class the opportunity to seize power, establish an autonomous form of local government, and establish in Verona one of the first free Italian communes..
Post-earthquake reconstruction: the Veronese Romanesque style
The 12th century was thus a flourishing period for Veronese architecture; both the high number of church buildings and their peculiarities make Verona's Romanesque architecture among the most notable despite being less well known than Lombard-Emilian Romanesque architecture, probably because Veronese Romanesque, with the sole exception of the exuberant basilica of San Zeno, presents discrete and austere building complexes, absent of sculptural decoration. The Veronese style, in fact, is only partly related to that of Emilia while it finds some elements of Venetian influence: in particular from the lagoon, similarities can be found in the adoption of the basilica plan layout, the near absence of vaults and the use, instead, of wide timber roof trusses; the types of plans, however, also find some parallels in the Cluniac architecture of northern France..
Other features found in Veronese Romanesque include the marked verticality given by the external use of lesenes and half-columns (often with Corinthian-order capitals, thus repetitions of classical decorative elements that were easy to find in the city) leaning against the masonry in addition to the lack, in most cases, of horizontal architectural or decorative elements, except for the carved tuff cornices crowning the elevations. Then there is the construction technique of the walls, which becomes for a long period of time a constant, that is, the use in the masonry of courses in tuff ashlars alternating with courses in brickwork, which among other things create vivid color effects.
Among the most striking examples of this flourishing religious architecture is the church of Santa Maria Antica, famous above all because the princes of Verona, the Della Scala family, built next to it, which became their personal chapel, a small masterpiece of Gothic architecture, the so-called Scaliger tombs. The interior of the church building is characterized by three naves separated by two rows of columns with capitals in the shape of an inverted pyramid, with the aisles covered by rib vaults and the nave originally covered by wooden trusses..
Among the oldest Romanesque buildings is the church of San Fermo Maggiore, whose construction began before the earthquake and ended in the 12th century. The peculiar building provided from the beginning for the superimposition of two churches identical in plan; while the upper church was rebuilt in the Gothic style, the lower one presents substantially intact the original appearance, with the aisles separated from the central one by an alternation of square pillars and cruciform pillars (although the nave, for technical reasons, was divided longitudinally by a series of slender pillars), and a short transept with apses oriented in the same direction as the three major apses, placed at the aisles. Finally, the space is covered by a dense cross-vaulted roof..
Significant for the development of the communal city were two complexes that were built on the flanks of the ancient Via Postumia, a road that extended from Porta Borsari into the countryside: the church of San Lorenzo and the previously mentioned church of Santi Apostoli. The former presents a plan similar to that of the lower church of San Fermo, with the transept whose short arms are articulated in two bays and equipped with oriented apses. The building has a stern and compact exterior, punctuated by massive buttresses and two tall cylindrical scalar towers that enclose the gabled facade; the two towers are a new element in Po Valley architecture and refer rather to the Nordic tradition. The interior is also extremely peculiar due to the presence, a unicum for Po Valley architecture, of a matroneum that also runs along the counterfacade and not only at the side aisles. The latter are separated from the nave by arches imposed on cruciform pillars alternating with columns and are covered by a row of rib vaults, while the nave is covered by wooden trusses..
The Church of the Holy Apostles has a plan typical of Norman and Burgundian architecture, with three naves ending in three apses, the central one of which is very deep and the side ones carved into the thickness of the wall. The monocuspidal facade is punctuated by four buttresses similar to those of San Lorenzo, though the church was elevated and the naves reduced to one during the transformations that the building underwent in the 16th century; traces of Romanesque construction are nevertheless evident on the exterior, as the elevated part has been plastered while the Romanesque part is characterized by the typical Romanesque Veronese face, with alternating courses of brick and tuff..
Moving on to the other side of the Adige River, in the Veronetta district, is the church of San Giovanni in Valle, built from 1120 on the remains of an 8th-century building: this is one of the most valuable works of late Veronese Romanesque, where one can see the now achieved balance between plan and elevation, the use of the basilical plan with three naves separated by columns alternating with pillars, but with the renunciation, on the outside, of the chromatic alternation derived from the use of brick and tuff. In this case the external decoration is entrusted to the use of regular tuff ashlars and the classical frieze that crowns some elevations. The greater classical sensibility can be seen in particular in the amplitude of the emerging masses of the apses (of which the northern one has lesenes crowned by finely sculpted Corinthian capitals), and is repeated in the size of the bell tower, connected to the building by means of a large semicircular arch reminiscent of the Roman Ponte Pietra, and in the rhythm of the small arches of the cloister, of which, however, only one arm has survived. The interior of the church possesses a linearity, given by the three simple naves covered by wooden trusses, interrupted only by the raised chancel, under which the crypt finds its place, while the dim natural lighting from narrow monoforas openings over the nave recreates the original and evocative atmosphere..