Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, Pavia, Lombardy, Italy, Europe

The Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro is a church in Pavia with the dignity of a minor basilica. Built, perhaps over a previous church from the 6th century, at the beginning of the 8th century in the Lombard era it is mentioned for the first time by the historian Paolo Diacono (720-799). The basilica was rebuilt in Romanesque style between the 11th and 12th centuries. The original early Christian basilica, called San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro because of the golden vaults, was built on the site where Saint Severino Boezio, a Roman philosopher and senator killed by the Ostrogoth king Theodoric the Great in 525, was buried. Some archaeological excavations, carried out in 2018/19 behind the apse of the basilica, brought to light walls referable to the apse of the previous building. An outstanding example of Lombard Romanesque architecture and generally considered, together with the Basilica of San Michele Maggiore, the most important medieval religious monument in the city of Pavia, the church was reconsecrated by Pope Innocent II in 1132 at the end of the reconstruction works. It boasts great prestige and notoriety in the Catholic world as it houses the remains of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and Saint Severinus Boethius (475-525). It is mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy (Paradise - Canto 10 vv. 124-128) as the sacred repository of the remains of Boethius and by Petrarch (Descriptio Urbis Ticinensis in Petrarch's Letter to Giovanni Boccaccio, Seniles, Lib. V, Lett. 1a, and in the treatise De avaritia vitanda, Opera, Basel edition 1554, vol. I, p. 607 et seq.). It also appears in one of the last stories of the Decameron (Torello and Saladin, Novella IX, Giornata X) by Boccaccio. Having fallen into a state of ruinous abandonment after the sacrilegious Napoleonic spoliations, the basilica was restored between 1875 and 1899.