Abbey of San Lanfranco: tickets, opening hours and tips

The Abbey of San Lanfranco is a Romanesque monastic complex on the left bank of the Ticino, a few kilometres from the centre of Pavia: a brick church with a façade decorated with ceramics, a bell tower from 1237 and two 15th-century cloisters. Inside are a tomb carved by Amadeo and a rare fresco of the murder of Thomas Becket.

The gabled façade is framed by two massive buttresses and decorated at the top with ceramic bowls, archaic Pavia majolica, which also appear on the bell tower. Inside, with a single nave and a Latin-cross plan, the Renaissance presbytery keeps a carved walnut choir bearing the name of Abbot Luca Zanachi.

The church's treasure is the Ark of San Lanfranco, the marble tomb carved by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo in 1489. Its panels tell the life and miracles of the bishop: in one scene you can make out Pavia's two cathedrals and the Regisole statue, and a half-hidden figure is said to have the face of Amadeo himself.

On the right wall of the nave is the Thomas Becket fresco, painted between 1173 and 1198: three knights with swords kill the Archbishop of Canterbury. To the right of the church, one arcaded side survives of the small cloister, with terracotta putti and paired slender columns of red Verona marble.

Becket is not there by chance. Like him, the Pavia bishop Lanfranco Beccari clashed with the civil power and had to go to Rome to seek the pope's help. He was not killed: he withdrew to this monastery, where he was often a guest, and was buried here in 1198, with a reputation for holiness. Since then the church has borne his name.

The monastery, of the Vallombrosan monks, stood outside the city but along a road of travellers and pilgrims, who found hospitality in its hospice. Its position, however, put it at the centre of wars: in 1356 Galeazzo II Visconti camped his troops here to besiege Pavia.

In October 1524 King Francis I of France set up his headquarters here to besiege the city, and during the Battle of Pavia the monastery was the scene of fighting and was damaged by fire.