Looking North: Architecture in Emilia (c. 1000)

This paper considers architecture in Emilia at the turn of the first millennium (ca. 980-1020), with a primary focus on the area between Piacenza and Modena. It discusses two buildings, Sant’Antonino in Piacenza (ca. 1014) and Sant’Uldarico in Parma (c. 1000). The former is dedicated to a local bishop and saint, Antoninus, and it housed his remains, while the latter—whose medieval structures I discovered in 2010—is dedicated to a ‘German’ saint, Ulrich of Augsburg, recently canonised at the time of its construction. In both cases, a local bishop promoted their construction. Analysis of these two sites, it will be argued, shows the deployment of architectural elements and languages that were novel within the geographical framework of northern Italy at that time, but extremely common north of the Alps, in the Ottonian and Salian Empire. Positioning this work in relation to both past debates and recent discoveries, the investigation of the personal, familial and political background of the bishops, and the networks to which they belonged, reveal viable connections with the Empire, showing the extent to which, at the turn of the first millennium, architecture in Emilia was looking north.