Santa Maria Maggiore, Alatri, Romanesque church building in Alatri, Italy

Santa Maria Maggiore is a church in Alatri whose 14th-century facade has three portals with frescoed lunettes; the central one keeps a late-14th-century Madonna and Child. Above it sits a rose window whose quadrilobe design echoes a drawing by Villard de Honnecourt. The interior has a nave and two unequal aisles on composite pillars, and the bell tower dates from 1394.

Founded in the 5th century over a temple of Venus, the church was first documented in 1137. Burgundian workshops gave it its present Romanesque-Gothic lines in the 13th century; the facade dates from the 14th century and the bell tower was added in 1394, as a plaque with the arms of Boniface IX records.

In the first chapel of the left aisle stands the polychrome wooden Madonna of Constantinople, carved by an anonymous Lazio artist between the 12th and 13th centuries and restored in 2019; she holds an egg, symbol of resurrection. Its polyptych panels show twelve relief scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin. The same chapel holds the Triptych of the Redeemer, the only signed work of Antonio da Alatri, painted in the early 15th century.

The location is easily accessible and sits at the center of Alatri where visitors can find it on foot. Keep in mind it remains an active place of worship, so appropriate dress and behavior are expected.

The rose window's quatrefoil pattern and trefoil motifs closely match drawings in Villard de Honnecourt's Livre de Portraiture (c. 1235, now in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris); the same design is reproduced to scale in the rose window of the nearby church of San Francesco.