Sanctuary of Saint Catherine

Why Go

A house the city could not leave alone

Siena wanted to keep the place its saint came from, and the way a fifteenth-century city kept a place was to build on it. What you walk through today is four and a half centuries of devotion laid over a dyer's house: a modern portico, two atria, a baroque church, a confraternity hall where the kitchen used to be, and, down a staircase, the cubicle where she actually slept. The complex is honest about being a complex. Going in expecting a medieval interior will disappoint; going in expecting to see what devotion does to a building over four hundred years will not.

Dyer's house, civic property, sanctuary

Jacopo Benincasa, a wool dyer, rented a three-level house on the slope below the Camporegio hill in the first half of the fourteenth century. It served as both a warehouse for dyeing cloth and a home for a very large family. The district is Fontebranda, named for the great covered spring at the bottom of the hill, and it belonged to the woolworkers' guild. Catherine was born there in 1347.

She was canonized in 1461. Five years later the commune of Siena bought the house. That purchase is what saved the site and also what began changing it: a building owned by a city for the sake of a saint does not stay a house. Around 1482 the Confraternity of Saint Catherine took the space where the family kitchen had been as its meeting room, and remodeled it into what is now the Kitchen Oratory. The original fireplace was not destroyed; what remains of it can be seen through a grille under the altar.

The largest addition came in the seventeenth century. Between 1614 and 1623 a baroque church was built into the complex to house the wooden crucifix before which, the tradition holds, Catherine received the stigmata at Pisa in 1375. That crucifix had been brought to Siena in 1565 and was formally installed here on May 21, 1623. A reliquary in the same church holds a fragment of her shoulder blade.

The last major work was the entrance. The Portico dei Comuni, built between 1941 and 1947 and paid for by Italian municipalities, is the brick loggia and courtyard visitors now come in through. A Confessional Chapel was added and inaugurated in April 2006. Almost nothing you see first is medieval, and almost all of it was built because of what happened here.

A vertical complex rather than a building, following the slope. The 1940s Portico dei Comuni opens into a small sixteenth-century atrium, then a second atrium. On the right of the second atrium are the Church of the Crucifix of 1614 to 1623 and the modern Confessional Chapel; on the other side is the Kitchen Oratory, a confraternity hall of the 1480s with a coffered ceiling, sitting on the footprint of the Benincasa kitchen. A staircase on the left descends to the Oratory of the Bedroom, the lowest and oldest level. The materials are Sienese brick throughout, which disguises how many different centuries are stacked here.