Basilica of San Domenico

Why Go

The church at the top of her street

Catherine did not travel to San Domenico. She lived below it. The Benincasa house sits in Fontebranda, a few minutes down a steep slope, and the basilica on the Camporegio hill is the church she could see from her own door. Almost everything the Church later called her vocation happened inside it: the habit, the ecstasies, the dictation that became the Dialogue. Six centuries after her death the relic of her head is still there, in a chapel built to receive it, under frescoes painted by a man who was trying to show what her prayer looked like from outside.

A preaching church, and the laywoman it formed

Dominic himself came to Siena with the first friars around 1215. Ten years later a Sienese gentleman, Fortebraccio Malavolti, gave the Order the Camporegio hill, and the friars began building. What they put up was a preaching church: a single vast brick hall, almost without ornament, designed so that a large crowd could hear one man speak. It is still the plainest major church in a city famous for decorated ones, and the plainness is the point.

Catherine Benincasa was born in 1347 in the Fontebranda district below, the daughter of a dyer. She was formed by the friars of this church, and in her teens she asked to be admitted to the Mantellate, the lay Dominican women of Siena who wore the white habit and black mantle and lived in their own homes rather than in a convent. Her early biographer Raymond of Capua records that they hesitated: the Mantellate were mostly widows, and she was neither widowed nor willing to marry. She was received, and it happened in the Cappella delle Volte, the raised chapel that was the Mantellate's own.

She spent years in that chapel. Her disciples wrote down what she said while she prayed there, and those transcriptions became the Dialogue of Divine Providence. From roughly 1374 onward she was also doing something no laywoman of her position was expected to do: dictating letters to magistrates, to cardinals, and eventually to the pope, arguing that the papacy belonged in Rome. She went to Rome herself in 1378 and died there in 1380, thirty-three years old.

Her body stayed in Rome. Raymond of Capua, by then Master of the Dominican Order, obtained permission from Urban VI to separate her head so that her own city could have her. It was carried to Siena in a silk bag, and in 1385 Raymond told the Consistory of the Republic that it had arrived. Siena met it with a procession that walked from San Lazzaro up to this church. The relic has been here since.

A brick preaching hall of the thirteenth century, aisleless, roofed in open timber trusses, with a raised transept and chapels at the east end and a squat campanile whose upper stage was rebuilt after earthquake damage. Nothing about the exterior is decorative; the great blank flank facing the city reads more like a fortification than a church, which is roughly what an unfinished Dominican brick facade always looks like. Inside, the scale is the argument: one uninterrupted volume with a clear sightline to the pulpit. The Cappella delle Volte, reached by steps at the entrance end, is the older surviving fragment and is set above the level of the nave.