Offida. Collegiate Church of S. Maria Assunta

2022

Collegiate Church. Built between 1785 and 1798 by the Ticino architect Pietro Maggi, who substituted and profoundly changed the design by Ascoli Lazzaro Giosafatti; it has a neoclassical Louis XVI interior and a facade built only at the end of the nineteenth century in an eclectic style of brick and travertine. Inside, among other things, there is a thirteenth-century wooden casket with 26 ivory figurines of northern art, a fourteenth-century processional cross, a fifteenth-century reliquary, a sixteenth-century wooden group, a wooden crucifix by Desiderio Bonfini (1612) , paintings of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Crivellesque school and school of Pietro Alemanno). The choir carved with twisted columns and mirrors in Verona briar with two orders of 14 stalls was built by Alessio Donati for the church of Santa Maria della Rocca but was transferred in 1794 to the Collegiate, together with the relics of San Leonardo di Noblac preserved in a urn placed inside the main altar, also in wood. On 12 November 1994 the body of Blessed Corrado da Offida was placed in the third altar on the left, solemnly moved from Perugia, where it had been kept in the now no longer consecrated Church of San Francesco al Prato. The church, despite the distance, was affected by the strong earthquake that occurred in L'Aquila on 6 April 2009: in fact, on the day of the earthquake some pieces of plaster fell off the bell tower.