Il San Francesco a Cascia. Storia e restauri

The first news about the church of San Francesco in Cascia dates back to 1247, the year in which the Convent of the Minors was transferred within the urban area. The new location of the convent complex, at the south-west edge of the city walls and near one of the city gates, contributed to the economic and social development and organization of the surrounding urban space. The façade of the church forms the backdrop to a very elongated trapezoidal square that has on its axis, in the opposite direction, at the end of a narrow village, the collegiate church of S. Maria, incorporated within the urban structure following the expansion towards the valley, in a north-west direction, of the circuit of the walls. The building is the result of the transformation begun during the last quarter of the fourteenth century and concluded in the first twenty years of the following century, probably also induced to repair the damage caused by the earthquake of 1338 on the original thirteenth-century structure. The architectural organism still retains its spatial unity substantially intact, despite having been the subject, in various eras, of ‘modernizations’, structural interventions (especially after the violent earthquakes of 1599 and 1703) and restorations. The demolition of the convent, which insisted on the right side of the church, which occurred during the thirties of the last century for the opening of the new road axis, determined an almost total estrangement of the ecclesiastical building from the current urban context.