Frommer's Review
This church is as beautiful as a 12th-century Romanesque church can get. It boasts a Pisan-inspired facade of blind arches with lozenges and colonnaded arcades stacked even higher than San Martino's, and it's smack in the center of town -- on top of the ancient Roman forum, in fact, hence the name -- and yet this isn't the Duomo. Past the marvelous facade, with its orderly rows of doggedly unique columns topped by a Romanesquely flattened St. Michael, however, the interior of the church doesn't have too much to hold our attention. The original Matteo Civitali Madonna and Child sculpture from the facade is wedged in the right corner as you enter. (Its replacement doppelgänger basks in gilded beams of holy light on the outside corner of the church.) Another take on the same theme in glazed terra cotta by Andrea della Robbia (some now say it was by his uncle Luca) is inset on the first altar on the right. The church's best art hangs on the far wall of the right transept, a painting of Sts. Roch, Sebastian, Jerome, and Helen by Filippino Lippi, whose figures are more humanly morose but every bit as graceful as those of his famous teacher Sandro Botticelli. As you leave, check out the medieval graffiti drawings scratched on the columns of the left aisle (especially the third and fourth from the door).
Two generations of Puccinis played the organ in this church, and the third, one young master Giacomo, sang in the choir as a boy. He didn't have far to walk, for the young Giacomo Puccini, who was to become one of Italy's greatest operatic composers, was born in 1858 just down the block at Via Poggio no. 30 (plaque). Around the corner at Corte San Lorenzo 9 is the entrance to a small museum installed in his birth home (tel. 0583-584-028). Along with the usual composer memorabilia, it includes the piano on which he composed Turnadot. Admission is 3€ ($3.90) adults, 2€ ($2.60) for kids under 14. It's open daily June through September from 10am to 6pm, in winter Tuesday through Sunday from 10am to 1pm and 3 to 6pm; closed January and February. The nearby heavily baroque church of San Paolino is where the boy Puccini got his first crack at twiddling an organ's keyboard.
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