San Claudio al Chienti: note storico-architettoniche, geometria, parametri murari

The parish church of San Claudio al Chienti and the abbey churches of San Vittore delle Chiuse, Santa Croce dei Conti, and Santa Maria delle Moje form a group of buildings whose stylistic and distributive characteristics, construction solutions, and the relationships between the parts evoke architectural themes at the heart of an important historiographical tradition dating back to the 17th century. The considerations put forward by scholars over the last twenty years, however rigorous and articulate, both in terms of institutional and religious history and in terms of stylistic-comparative analysis and the chronology of Romanesque renovations, do not benefit from the much-desired documentation of excavations and complete stratigraphic analyses of the walls that would allow the themes and issues raised to be contextualized. The investigations conducted by the team of researchers from the University of Camerino included normal survey operations, a mensio-chronological study of the external walls, the use of multispectral imaging techniques, and thermography. The focus was mainly on material data, in an attempt to gather all the clues that only the direct study of the building can provide. The results of the comparison between the data obtained from the physical evidence of the building and the information obtained from the historiographical literature have produced partial confirmations.