Santa Maria Nuova church

Before you even step inside Santa Maria Nuova in Fano, a town on the Adriatic coast of the Marche, its stone doorway tells of a move. It was carved in 1498 by the stone carver Bernardino di Pietro da Carona for another church, at the Franciscan friars' convent of San Lazzaro outside the town walls. When troops besieged Fano in 1517, the friars abandoned that convent, and in 1518 they were given this old parish church of San Salvatore in the centre, which they rebuilt. The portal and their altarpieces followed them.

Those paintings are why visitors come. Pietro Perugino, the Umbrian master in whose workshop the young Raphael is said to have trained, painted two of them. His Annunciation, from around 1489, hangs on the left side of the nave. His larger altarpiece of 1497 shows the Madonna enthroned among five saints, with a Pietà above and small scenes from the Virgin's life below, and some scholars think the teenage Raphael had a hand in those little panels. The church also keeps a Visitation by Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, and a wooden choir carved in the 1480s by woodcarvers from Siena.