San Benedetto, Baroque church in Fontanellato, Italy.

San Benedetto is a Baroque church in Fontanellato with light-colored stone walls and ornamental details throughout its interior. Multiple arched windows create openings in the structure that let daylight filter into the worship space.

The first record of a church of San Benedetto dates to 1230, when it depended on the Abbey of Leno. It became a priory by 1332. In 1716 provost Paolo Aimi began a rebuilding that gave the complex its Baroque form; the façade was completed in 1751, probably to a design by Ottavio Bettoli. The church reopened in 2010 after restoration.

The name Priorato recalls the Benedictine priory documented here from 1332. The church was elevated to a pieve in 1579, with jurisdiction over the churches of Toccalmatto, Casalbarbato, Ghiara and Santa Croce di Fontanellato. Since 1971 the parish has been annexed to that of Santa Croce.

The church stands in the hamlet of Priorato, about 3 km from Fontanellato's centre, at the end of a wide churchyard flanked by the rectory and outbuildings. The former fishpond, now dry, wraps around the apse at the rear. The building was closed as unsafe in 2002 and reopened in 2010 after structural consolidation.

Behind the church, a dry fishpond built in 1784 wraps around the apse in a U shape, enclosing the rear garden. It was commissioned by monsignor Carlo Delfinoni, who also had the old Benedictine abbey replaced by a canonica. The pond is easy to miss from the entrance side.