Oratorio di Santa Maria in Valle

From outside it is a modest, almost plain chapel perched above the gorge of the Natisone. Inside, six tall women of stucco stand high on the entrance wall, richly robed, their long straight folds falling like fluted columns, flanking a window between bands of carved vines and rosettes. Modelled around the middle of the eighth century, they are among the most remarkable sculptures to survive from early medieval Europe, and the chapel that holds them, known as the Tempietto Longobardo, is the best preserved building of the Lombard kingdom in Italy.

The Lombards, a Germanic people, ruled much of the Italian peninsula from 568 to 774, and Cividale, the Roman Forum Iulii, was the first major town they took and the seat of their first duchy. The chapel was built around the middle of the eighth century on the site of the gastaldaga, the palace of the official who governed the town, and served as a palatine chapel; its foundation is usually credited to Aistulf, Duke of Friuli and later King of the Lombards, and his wife Giseltrude. It was later absorbed into the Benedictine convent of Santa Maria in Valle, from which it takes its formal name.

The interior is a single square hall under a broad cross vault, closed by a lower presbytery divided by paired columns into three bays with parallel barrel vaults. On the west wall, once the entrance, the doorway lunette shows Christ between the archangels Michael and Gabriel, framed by vines with bunches of grapes, with a painted band of martyrs alongside and an openwork frieze of tendrils above, whose rosettes once held glass beads. The six female saints above draw on classical and Byzantine models, but their pronounced verticality and sense of volume are their own. The stucco work was never finished on the side walls and was originally partly coloured, and later fresco cycles and late fourteenth-century wooden choir stalls complete the room. Since 2011 the chapel has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site Longobards in Italy, Places of Power (568–774 A.D.). Cividale itself, divided by the Natisone and joined by the Devil's Bridge, also holds a cathedral with a museum of Lombard sculpture and a Palazzo dei Provveditori Veneti designed by Andrea Palladio.

Getting there

The chapel is in the Borgo Brossana quarter of Cividale del Friuli, in the foothills about 15 km east of Udine. The nearest airport is Trieste (TRS), about 30 km away; Venice Marco Polo lies further to the south-west.