Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista, Romanesque church in Matera, Italy

Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista has no true façade: its main portal, carved with vegetal scrolls, hanging columns and animal sculptures, opens on the right side under a rose window and a tuff statue of the Baptist. The Latin-cross interior has a central nave with star vaults and side aisles with cross vaults, divided by eight pillars with floral and animal capitals.

Penitents of Santa Maria di Accon arrived in Matera from the Kingdom of Acre in 1215 and received the chapel of Santa Maria la Nova in 1220. In 1229 they began a replacement church, completed in 1236. In 1480, during the Ottoman invasion of Otranto, the nuns abandoned it outside the walls. In 1695 Archbishop Antonio Del Ryos Colmenares transferred the parish here.

The church's name comes from the parish transferred here in 1695 from Sasso Barisano. Its stonework mixes styles: the main portal on the right side has vegetal scrolls, hanging columns and animal sculptures, with a tufa statue of Saint John the Baptist in the niche below the rose window. Inside, the medieval chapels hold a 16th-century fresco of the Madonna della Nova and two wooden statues of Saints Cosmas and Damian.

The church opens onto and gives its name to Piazza San Giovanni Battista, with the former Ospedale di San Rocco adjoining it to the southwest. The building has no true façade: the main entrance is the decorated portal on the right flank, under the rose window and the tufa statue of the Baptist.

In 1610 the original facade became part of an adjacent hospital, and the former right side of the building was repurposed as the main entrance. This transformation reveals how the church adapted to urban changes over the centuries.