Situated in the fields of the Marca Trevigiana is a beautiful little church with a rather wonderful secret inside it which we first visited in 2017. (https://wp.me/p4KnVs-ayp)

It is marked at the roadside as a ninth-century Lombard church, although if there was a Lombard church here, there certainly isn’t one there now. Most of what we can see dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is really more like a little chapel, called La Mattarella, after one of the people who sponsored what is inside.

And what is inside that humble exterior is the real treasure: a lovely sequence of frescoes only discovered relatively recently when an earthquake shook off the plaster covering them.

They may not be as majestic and grandiloquent as the Sistine Chapel, and they certainly aren’t as refined as Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua, but they are nevertheless very fine examples of sophisticated rural Renaissance art. And, more importantly, they are still there.

We were shown around by a very knowledgeable young lady from the local council who is an art student herself. She knew the church extremely well and, rather usefully, knew what we were looking at. There is nothing quite like having somebody who can point at a tiny figure in the corner and say, “Ah, look at this…” and suddenly you realise that you would otherwise have walked straight past it.

The apse has an extraordinary Crucifixion. She pointed out all the different characters: the sorrowful women, Pontius Pilate, and the two people being crucified alongside Christ. The good thief is on Jesus’s right and is looking towards Him, while the bad thief is on the left and is looking away. And, of course, the left-hand side is the sinister side. The Latin word for left was sinister, which has rather given the English language its own little prejudice against being left-handed.

Then you look upwards and there are more frescoes covering the vaulting: the Evangelists, the Doctors of the Church and all sorts of other figures. Everywhere you look there is something going on.

And really, this was the medieval and Renaissance equivalent of a cartoon book, although “picture book” is probably a little kinder. The people who came into these churches were, for the most part, unable to read. So the walls told them the stories. The Bible was there in pictures. They could see who was good, who was bad, who was suffering, who was being rewarded and who was being punished. It was religious education without anybody having to pick up a book.

And they did it very well.

What struck me afterwards was how many of these little churches there must be scattered all over Italy. You can drive through a village, see a tiny chapel by the roadside and think, “Oh, that’s nice,” and carry on. Yet inside there may be frescoes which have been there for five or six hundred years. There must be thousands of these places, many of them known only to the local people and a handful of art historians.

It also made me think about England, and what we have lost.

When you go into an English medieval church today, you often see white walls and bare stone and perhaps a few fragments of medieval painting. But that isn’t how these churches originally looked. The English churches were painted too. They were full of colour and images.

Then came the Reformation.

Henry VIII began the destruction, but it didn’t stop with Henry. Under Edward VI the Protestant attack on religious images became even more severe. Statues were smashed, paintings destroyed and walls were whitewashed. In many cases the paintings simply disappeared from view. Fortunately, some survived underneath the whitewash and have been uncovered in more recent times.

It is rather like the difference between looking at a black-and-white photograph and a colour one. You are looking at the same thing, but somehow it is an entirely different world.

And that is one of the things I particularly like about these Italian churches. You suddenly realise just how colourful the past was. We tend to imagine the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in rather sombre colours because so much of what survives in northern Europe has lost its paint. Here, you walk into a little chapel and suddenly there are blues, reds, golds and all these faces staring down at you.

Of course, Italy has had its own destroyer of churches and frescoes: earthquakes. There is nothing particularly ideological about an earthquake, but it can be just as effective. Add damp, neglect, war and the ordinary passage of time and it is remarkable that any of these paintings have survived at all.

So there we were, in the middle of the fields, looking at this little church with its wonderful frescoes, while our young art student patiently explained everything to us.

And that, really, was the pleasure of it.

It wasn’t the Sistine Chapel. It wasn’t the Scrovegni Chapel. It wasn’t even particularly famous. It was simply a little church in the countryside, with somebody knowledgeable enough to open its secrets to us.

And perhaps that is what makes these places so enjoyable. You never quite know what is behind the next little door in Italy.