Church of St. Peter

Interesting facts

Pope Gelasius II dedicated the church to Saint Peter on 19 July 1118 and presented it with a relic of the apostle.

Napoleonic troops stationed here carried off its paintings, melted down its bells, burned the roof beams as firewood and mounted a cannon battery inside.

In 1494 the church was hit both by a fire that swept the town and by Aragonese artillery during the Battle of Porto Venere.

After those blows the ruined church was stripped of its decorative stone, much of which was reused in San Lorenzo and other buildings in town.

The floor of the early Christian section is opus sectile: circles, bands and stars made from thin slabs of varied marbles, some brought from afar.

Excavations under the old apse uncovered what is probably a statue base, possibly a survivor of the pagan temple that stood here before the church.

A Romanesque loggia with four columned arches, once part of a Benedictine abbey, looks toward the Cinque Terre and reuses Roman building material.

A weathered Latin inscription records that the Genoese church was finished in August in the 1270s and names its master builders, Baldovino and Bertolo.

Inside, the Gothic church has three aisles under pointed rib vaults, with the bell tower rising directly above the left aisle.

After a long restoration and archaeological study the church was consecrated again in October 1934; its silver-and-marble doors are by sculptor Lello Scorzelli, 1992.

Why it is worth it

At the very tip of the Porto Venere peninsula, on a rock ledge where the Gulf of La Spezia meets the open Ligurian Sea, stands a small church striped in black and white stone. San Pietro looks out over cliffs that fall straight into the water, and the sea on three sides makes it one of the most dramatically placed churches on the Italian coast.

The building has two layers of history fused together. The oldest part goes back to the fifth century: an early Christian church with a rectangular plan and a semicircular apse, traditionally said to have been raised on the site of an ancient pagan temple — the town's Roman name, Portus Veneris, links it to Venus. The church was consecrated in 1198, and in the thirteenth century, probably between 1256 and 1277, it was extended in Genoese Gothic style with the bold horizontal bands of dark and light stone that define it today. Porto Venere had passed to the Republic of Genoa in the early twelfth century, and the Genoese also built the castle on the hill above. The church lost its parish role to San Lorenzo in the late fourteenth century and was restored between 1931 and 1935. The poet Eugenio Montale dedicated a poem to it.

Porto Venere itself is a fishing town of tall, narrow, colour-washed houses lined up along the harbour, with the islands of Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto just offshore. Together with the Cinque Terre and those islands it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. Below the church, a now-collapsed sea cave on the cliffs bears Lord Byron's name; in 1822 the poet swam across the gulf from here to visit Shelley at Lerici.

Getting there

The church stands at the southern end of Porto Venere, at the tip of the peninsula on the western side of the Gulf of La Spezia. The city of La Spezia is about 6 km away in a straight line, linked to Porto Venere by the coastal road along the gulf. The nearest airport is Pisa International Airport (PSA), about 61 km to the southeast.

Church of St. Peter

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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