Chiesa di San Michele in Borgo

This guide to Chiesa di San Michele in Borgo in Pisa starts with a facade that lies about what is behind it: three tiers of Gothic blind arcades carved in the thirteen hundreds, with a Madonna and Child by mason Lupo di Francesco, looking whole and cared for. Step inside and the story changes, because bombs gutted the church in the Second World War, leaving only that marble shell standing for decades. It follows architect Massimo Carmassi, who took on the rebuild in nineteen seventy-four and chose not to fake a medieval interior, instead setting raw brick beside Romanesque columns and leaving old scars visible on purpose. Somewhere past the work, a fourteenth-century crucifix attributed to Nino Pisano still hangs where it always has.