Looking for Cimabue
On my last visit to Bologna, I wanted to see out of curiosity a painting by Cimabue, that I knew was in a church in Bologna, but even with the internet, was not easy to discover where. I finally tracked it down, but unfortunately the painting on display is a copy, as it is on loan to one of those commercialised block buster exhibitions that museums seem to be concentrating on right now. Patience.
Behind the anonymous nineteenth century façade of Saint Vitale Agricola, and below the musty Baroque church, we descend a flight of stairs and find ourselves in a Paleo Christian crypt that dates back to the year 1000. For a while the church was not consecrated and the crypt was the meeting place of an aristocratic literary circle before disappearing in the nineteenth century. Several years later when the church was consecrated again and works were being carried out, the crypt remerged. The church is said to be constructed above the Roman arena, where Agricola and his slave Vital were martyred in a grisly way in about 300AD.
One of those little hidden gems that Italian cities conceal, unless you dig them out.
