Duomo San Cristoforo - Barga - Tuscany

This Romanesque gem dates from before the year 1000 and was immortalized by Pascoli.

The Cathedral of San Cristoforo in Barga is a Romanesque gem in the center of the village that almost looks like a fortress from the outside. The original building dates from before the year 1000, but it was modified over the centuries with decorative elements ranging from Romanesque to Gothic.

The stone facade is magnificent, with medieval decorations enriching the entire exterior of the cathedral. The main portal is dominated by an arch sculpted with leaves and a bas-relief representing a harvest, while the side portal contains a bas-relief attributed to the sculptor Biduino (12th century) that depicts the miracle of the Golden Skyphos of Saint Nicholas shows.
In the interior of the church are a beautiful marble pulpit, attributed to Guido Bigarelli da Como (13th century), depicting scenes from the Nativity, a terracotta ciborium for the sacred oils of Andrea Della Robbia and, in the Chapel of the Santissimo Sacramento, a terracotta altarpiece with the Virgin and St. Roch from the 16th century. The pulpit is supported by four columns, two of which rest on two dominating lions: one a dragon and the other a man. The rear columns rest one on the ground and the other on the back of a stooped old man.

In the apse, behind the main altar, within a niche, there is the polychrome wooden statue of St. Christopher, from the ninth century. In the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, to the right of the nave above the altar, an unglazed terracotta altarpiece depicting the Virgin and St. Roch (XVI century) is placed. On the side walls you can admire the Ciborium of the Holy Oils glazed terracotta, attributed to Andrea Della Robbia and a Madonna and Child.

In the chapel of the Madonna, to the left of the nave, above a seventeenth-century altar, you can admire a fourteenth-century table representing the Madonna del Molino, co-patroness of Barga, inserted in a sixteenth-century painting. On the right wall a crucifix of the 15th century Bolognese school.

The cathedral was also mentioned in a poem by Giovanni Pascoli, the poet who lived for a long time in Castelvecchio, a village close enough to Barga that he could hear the cathedral's bells ringing.

Willem Vandenameele