San Francesco al Prato church

San Francesco al Prato is a former Franciscan church located in Perugia, Italy, dedicated to Francis of Assisi. Established in the mid-thirteenth century, it historically served as the principal burial site for the city's elite, earning it the title of the Pantheon of Perugia. Although its vaults collapsed and it was desacralized in the twentieth century, the building remains architecturally significant. It is currently undergoing restoration to be converted into an auditorium.

Construction of the church began around 1251, following the model of the Upper Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. The Franciscan Order moved to this site around 1256 from their earlier convent at Pastina to better serve the urban poor near the Porta Santa Susanna district. Archaeological excavations begun in 2001 revealed that the church was built directly atop the older church of Santa Susanna, which then served as a crypt, mirroring the double-basilica structure at Assisi. During the fourteenth century, the convent housed a Franciscan studium where future popes Sixtus IV and Julius II studied. Following an internal split in the Franciscan Order, San Francesco al Prato became the seat of the Conventuals, while the Spirituals established themselves at San Francesco al Monte in Monteripido. From the fifteenth century onward, the building suffered severe structural instability due to hillside subsidence and earthquakes. An eighteenth-century renovation by Pietro Carattoli added heavy buttresses that inadvertently accelerated the collapse, leading to the demolition of the dome, nave vaults, and part of the apse. The church was desacralized in the twentieth century, and internal demolitions occurred in the 1930s and 1960s.

While San Francesco al Prato is a church rather than a museum, its historical holdings were of extraordinary artistic significance. Originally filled with frescoes and panel paintings from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the interior served as a repository for funerary monuments and devotional art commissioned by Perugia's prominent families. Over the centuries, as structural failures threatened the building, its major artworks were removed for safekeeping and dispersed to major museums. The remaining sculptural and architectural fragments, such as a fourth-century sarcophagus and Renaissance chapel decorations, underscore the site's role as a premier center of Franciscan art and aristocratic patronage in Perugia.

The church originally housed several masterpieces of Renaissance painting that have since been relocated. These include Raphael's Couronnement de la Vierge and Deposition Borghese, now in the Vatican Museums and the Borghese Gallery respectively, and Perugino's Resurrection of San Francesco al Prato, also in the Vatican. Orazio Alfani's Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine is now in the Louvre, and the Maestro di San Francesco's crucifix is held by the National Gallery of Umbria. A prominent gonfalon painted by Benedetto Bonfigli and Mariano d'Antonio during the 1464 plague, depicting the Madonna della Misericordia and the church's facade, is now in the Oratory of San Bernardino. That oratory also houses a fourth-century Jonah sarcophagus, originally used to hold the remains of Blessed Egidio in the crypt. Remaining on site are the sarcophagi of the condottiere Braccio da Montone and the jurist Bartolo da Sassoferrato, located in the Oratorio della Santissima Concezione, along with a fifteenth-century painted wooden statue attributed to Domenico di Nicolò dei Cori.

Situated on Piazza San Francesco at the end of Via dei Priori, the church is flanked by the Renaissance Oratory of San Bernardino. The Gothic structure features a Latin cross plan with a single nave, transept, and a polygonal apse, originally divided into three bays with brick ogival cross vaults supported by pillars. The exterior is distinguished by a Cosmatesque polychrome facade with geometric white and pink marble patterns, a rose window, and Romanesque lateral buttresses terminating in a tympanum. Elegant mullioned windows line the walls. The facade, which had been obscured by later additions such as the Gonfalone Chapel in 1465, was restored to its original appearance in 1926 by architect Pietro Angelini, based on its depiction in Bonfigli's gonfalon. Surviving chapels added to counter structural instability, such as the Baldeschi and Oddi chapels, feature ogival arches decorated with colored marbles and glazed terracotta. A small amber fresco fragment from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, depicting a fleur-de-lis linked to the Angevin Louis of Toulouse, survives high on the left nave wall.

The church is currently desacralized and closed for ongoing consolidation and restoration work. The adjacent former convent now houses the Perugia Academy of Fine Arts. Since the early 2000s, a radical restoration project, originally designed by Bruno Signorini, has been underway to transform the historic church into a municipal auditorium. As the building remains an active construction and restoration site, public access is restricted, though the exterior polychrome facade and the adjacent oratory can be viewed from Piazza San Francesco.