If you are an art and history lover and want to delve deeper into Città della Pieve’s past, you can’t miss the Museo Civico-Diocesano, located just outside Porta Romana.
It stands in what was originally the Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi, built in the second half of the 13th century. The ancient church, which has very elegant, refined and luminous walls on the inside and a beautiful crypt, bears elements that represent the various artistic currents and different periods in which various interventions took place within it.
Gothic art can be seen in the structure, which recalls the churches of the mendicant orders, with its single nave and an apse with a square cross. Traces of the Baroque style found in the interior decorations, in the stuccos and in the altars of the side chapels instead date back to the period from the 17th to the 18th century. The present museum also has numerous paintings, most of them in the Mannerist style. There were many artists who worked on pieces to decorate the church, including Antonio Circignani known as Il Pomarancio, Salvio Savini and Alessandro Brunelli, whose paintings are displayed in the side altars, the Cremoni brothers, who created numerous decorations, and Pietro Vannucci, a.k.a. Perugino. He created frescoes dating back to 1517, although only traces of the “Compianto sul Cristo morto” and the “Deposizione dalla Croce” remain. These works are found in the ancient chapel dedicated to the Madonna della Stella although they remained hidden inside a cavity until 1834, when they were brought to light by the German painter and art historian Johann Anton Ramboux.
To complete the church, a bell tower was built 1834 by the neoclassical architect Giovanni Santini.