Description
The Church of San Pietro in Vinculis, known to Pisans as San Pierino, is a Romanesque church on Via Cavour, in the center of Pisa, consecrated in 1118. It's worth a visit for its stone façade, its inlaid floor and a crypt older than the church itself.
The façade has three portals topped by two-light windows, an unusual arrangement, beneath two tiers of blind arches with oculi and lozenges. Inside are Roman columns with Corinthian capitals, the Cosmatesque floor, a Roman sarcophagus and a 13th-century painted Cross. Below lies the crypt, with cross vaults, built before 1018: perhaps originally a loggia for merchants.
The bell tower was a secular tower, handed over to the church in 1157: that's why it keeps its very narrow medieval openings.
Until the Florentine conquest the church kept the Pisan Pandects, the manuscripts of Justinian's Digest. Only a few authorized jurists could read them, and every three months the chancellors came to check on them and keep them clean. Today they're in Florence, at the Laurentian Library.
The façade has three portals topped by two-light windows, an unusual arrangement, beneath two tiers of blind arches with oculi and lozenges. Inside are Roman columns with Corinthian capitals, the Cosmatesque floor, a Roman sarcophagus and a 13th-century painted Cross. Below lies the crypt, with cross vaults, built before 1018: perhaps originally a loggia for merchants.
The bell tower was a secular tower, handed over to the church in 1157: that's why it keeps its very narrow medieval openings.
Until the Florentine conquest the church kept the Pisan Pandects, the manuscripts of Justinian's Digest. Only a few authorized jurists could read them, and every three months the chancellors came to check on them and keep them clean. Today they're in Florence, at the Laurentian Library.