On any random day in the latter half of the 1400s, the square in front of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta must have been quite crowded and busy. The country people walked back and forth bent under the weight of their carts loaded with grains and red beets. The merchants shouted to draw the attention of the rich citizens coming out of an arringo – a city council meeting of those times – from one noble building or other situated around the church. Some of them crossed over the dusty square dodging pigs or kicking chickens out of the way, others were chatting in groups, discussing in low voices the new regulations imposed by the pope to bring back morality that had gone slack. The good conditions and wealth that had developed in town in recent times had led the inhabitants, mostly the noble class and the clergy, to form lecherous habits, which obligated the legislator to intervene in 1444 with laws concerning prostitution, gambling, offensive language and loan-sharking.
The square was probably quite crowded but, as usual, there were very few women about, hardly any at all after the new law was passed. If lustful men spent enormous amounts on prostitution, naturally it was the women’s fault for being too provocative; so it was now forbidden for them to wear ‘coquettish’ clothes. They could not be made of expensive material, but the sleeves could be lined with silk and their muffs could be of velvet; their jewelry and hairdos could not cost or be worth more than three ducats; their tiaras could not be of gold or silver, not even for a wedding. Everything had to be toned down. More than ten guests were not allowed at a wedding banquet. Women could not take part in public funerals; and actually, the less they showed their faces in public, the better it was. There were also laws that regulated how low necklines could be and how high the heels of shoes could be – which couldn’t be higher than four fingers.
This is probably the context in which we should imagine one of the most curious things about the cathedral. Approaching the church and standing under the elegant 17th century portico with a balustrade surmounted by a statue of St. Valentine and other seven bishop saints, you can see on a slab of stone over the lozenge-shaped window to the left of the main door, an etching of a shoe print. There have been many strange interpretations of this finding, discovered during renovations carried out in the 1900s. The most reasonable one – albeit not historically confirmed – is that it concerns those laws passed in 1444 to limit low moral behavior. The engraving shows the measure of the permitted height of women’s heels, represented by an 8 cm line (3 in), which corresponds to the four fingers set by the regulation; a penalty fine was half a gold ducat.
This shoe print, of course, is not the only interesting thing about the cathedral, part of which dates back to the 6th century, when the saint Anastasio was the bishop of Terni. His tomb is in the crypt, and it was likely his death that led to a thousand years of life in this place; this can be confirmed by the nearby ancient Amphitheater Fausto of the first century. The structure of the crypt and the presence of an apse and windows leads us to believe that it was not underground in the 11th century, but was a functioning church. It was greatly enlarged during the 15th and 16th centuries, but what we admire today is from the 17th century. The oriental bell tower was added a century later.
Hardly anything remains of the 1600s furnishings, which disappeared during Napoleon’s devastations and under WWII bombings. Both these events brought to light ruins of an ancient Romanesque structure – for example, part of the inner façade with a rose window and two double-arched windows. The third chapel on the left aisle is called the Chapel of Mercy because there is a painting attributed to Carlo Maratta of Our Lady of Mercy (Madonna della Misericordia); Maratta was one of the most important representatives of Roman classicism in the 1600s. The organ, whose pipes are bridled in a series of gilded branches, is another exquisite work of art in the church. It was built by Luca Neri in 1647, and documents found in the city archives attribute the design to none other than the famous Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Some claim that because of the close friendship between Bernini and the Cardinal Rapaccioli who commissioned the reconstruction works of the cathedral, the entire project was given to the Neapolitan architect and sculptor Bernini.
There are many enigmas surrounding the Cathedral dedicated to St Maria Assunta from the mysterious etching on the door to the hand that designed the cathedral’s appearance. What remains certain is its elegance, its long history and the impression it makes on visitors who stroll out of the narrow streets into the square and suddenly find it right in front of them.