Baglioni Chapel

Baglioni Chapel tickets: which one to buy

The chapel is inside the collegiate church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Spello and is entered free with the rest of the church, though a coin-operated light is needed to see the frescoes properly and a small ticket is charged for the adjoining pinacoteca. There is no guide service. Spello is on the Foligno to Perugia railway line, twenty minutes from Assisi, and the church is a five-minute walk uphill from the station through the old gate.

Guided tours of Umbria include Spello and cost several times anything you will spend here. Nothing needs booking. The town is small, walled and steeply stepped, and the chapel is one of three or four reasons visitors come; the flower festival in June is the other. The sacristan will usually point out the light switch and expects nothing for it, though a coin in the box is customary.

Visiting Baglioni Chapel: what to see

Troilo Baglioni, prior and later bishop, commissioned Pinturicchio to fresco this small square chapel and the work was finished in 1501, the last important commission the painter completed in Umbria before moving to Rome and Siena. Three lunettes fill the walls: the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Shepherds and Christ among the Doctors, set in invented architecture and deep landscapes with the detail and gold-highlighted brilliance that made Pinturicchio popular and, later, unfashionable. In the Annunciation he painted his own portrait hanging on the wall of the Virgin's room, beside a shelf of household objects.

Four sibyls sit in the vault. The floor is majolica tile from Deruta, laid later in the sixteenth century, and the whole room was air-conditioned in the 1970s to control humidity. Pinturicchio signed the work on a cartouche and the chapel was restored in 1976 and 1977, which is why the colours are unusually clean for Umbrian fresco. The three scenes are enclosed within painted pilasters and arches that continue the real architecture of the chapel, a device Pinturicchio used to make the small room feel like a loggia.

Baglioni Chapel opening hours and the best time to go

The church is open daily with a long break in the middle of the day, opening again in the late afternoon; hours shorten in winter. The chapel is lit by a timed switch and the coins are worth bringing. Spello is quiet outside the June flower festival, the Infiorate, when the streets are carpeted with petal pictures overnight and the town is full. Umbria is green in spring and hot in August. Dress modestly. Photography without flash is permitted.

Allow twenty minutes for the chapel. Assisi is twenty minutes away by train, and the Roman gates and mosaics of Spello itself take another hour. Spello's Infiorate takes place on the feast of Corpus Christi, sixty days after Easter, and the carpets are laid overnight and destroyed by the procession the next morning. Winter mornings are the quietest and the church is unheated, which matters in an Umbrian hill town in January.