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The Parish Church of Sant'Andrea

The parish church of Sant'Andrea is the second religious monument in order of importance after the Cathedral of Santa Maria. Regarding its age however it beats all the other religious buildings in Sarzana and the surrounding area. A document which refers it along with the even older parish church of Saint Basil dates back to 1154. Saint Basil church disappeared and eventually the Cathedral of Santa Maria was built; however its construction can be placed in the first half of the XI century on its site.


During the following century the people of Sarzana, aware of the importance their city was acquiring, commenced the reconstruction of the two churches: alongside the works which established Santa Maria there was the extension of the Sant Andrea church. In 1500 there was a major alteration to the original structure: the three Romanesque naves were replaced by a single apse un'unica aula monoabsidata; the portal acquired unusual door posts for the entrance to a Catholic church: two caryatids with bare breasts.

Recent works have taken the church back to its Medieval purity, freeing it from the Baroque-like stucco added in 1600, and revealing the presence of the crypt. More recently a seismic shock has rendered the church inaccessible. Therefore we must be satisfied with a description of the church: it holds the sole semi-interred tomb slab going back to Medieval times still surving in Sarzana (XIV century), the sweet Virgin of the Annunciation (la dolce Vergine Annunciata in Italian), also from the XIV century; the sixteenth-century statue of Saint Andrew (Sant'Andrea in Italian), albeit slightly the worse for wear after being there all these centuries (up to the 1950’s) on the top of the portal together with Saint Peter (San Pietro) and Saint Paul (San Paolo) – for those of you who didn’t know until now, Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Sarzana; the likeable cherubim which, at the end of the 1500’s, were positioned by Giovanni Morello of Carrara to support the only baptismal font currently in the city. However, these and many other delights are currently denied to us for the moment; from the outside we can admire the architectural importance of the bell tower which is incorporated into the church and the refinement of the mullioned window in the facade dating back to 1100: that funny small head holding the two window arches has seen quite a lot of the people of Sarzana pass by in his time.

MONUMENTS OF HISTORICAL CENTER