San Pietro a Crepacore, Romanesque church in Torre Santa Susanna, Italy.
San Pietro a Crepacore is a square-plan church in the Crepacore district of Torre Santa Susanna, built between the 6th and 7th centuries from irregular blocks of local carparo stone. Its facade has a round-arched portal on two rough columns, and a low apse at the rear with two plain pilasters and a bifora window. Inside, three naves are divided by columns with reused Hellenistic shafts supporting low round arches; the central nave is covered by two low domes on high drums.
San Pietro a Crepacore is dated by scholars to the 6th–7th century, since no historical documents record its foundation. The square-plan building was raised in irregular blocks of local carparo stone, probably reused from the remains of a Roman-era village found nearby in recent excavations. A necropolis uncovered around the church is dated to the 7th century AD, supporting that same dating for the first construction.
Inside, frescoes in the first bay follow Longobard-Beneventan models, while those in the second bay and on the apse walls belong to Byzantine art. Along the lower edge of the apse a Greek dedicatory inscription was recently found, naming the servant of God, his wife Veneria and their children.
The church stands in the open countryside of the Crepacore area, in the municipality of Torre Santa Susanna, away from built-up centres, so it is reached by country roads and best visited with your own transport. It lies along the route of the Via ad Lippium, the road recorded in notarial documents of 1100 that branched off the Via Appia at Oria and headed towards Lecce and Otranto.
A Greek dedicatory inscription along the lower edge of the apse was recently discovered, naming the servant of God, his wife Veneria and their children, and asking for the remission of their sins. It is one of the few written traces left by the church's early community.
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