Church of Sant'Ansano

The church of Sant'Ansano was entirely rebuilt at the end of the 18th century by the Milanese architect Antonio Dotti. The interior has a single nave and contains interesting works of art, including a fresco by Giovanni di Pietro called "Lo Spagna" representing the Madonna and Child with Two Saints, a surviving fragment of the pictorial decoration of the "Cappella dei Lombardi", and a painting of the Martyrdom of Sant'Ansano by the seventeenth-century painter Archita Ricci da Urbino, placed on the high altar. From the church you can access the underlying Crypt of St. Isaac, Syrian monk arrived in Spoleto in the first half of the sixth century and the first representative of the hermitic phenomenon on Monteluco. In early Christian times a church was built in the structures of a previous Roman temple and only later it became the crypt of a new church, built above it because of the raising of the street level. It has three small naves covered by cross vaults and divided by bare columns with early medieval capitals, datable to the VIII-IX centuries. The crypt is also decorated with very interesting frescoes dating back to the XI-XII centuries, put back in situ in 1971 after a previous detachment and restoration.