Maria in Porto fuori. About
the middle of the eleventh century, Dr Ricci tells us, certain
religious retired into the solitude by the shore of the Adriatic and
there built a little church or oratory that was called S. Maria _in
fossula_. In this act we may certainly see the example of S. Romuald.
But about 1096 there joined himself to them Pietro degli Onesti called
_Il Peccatore_, and perhaps because he was of the Onesti he built
there a new and a larger church, it is said in fulfilment of a vow
made, as was Galla Placidia's, in a storm at sea. It is this church
which in great part we still see, with additions of the thirteenth
century, a lonely and beautiful thing in the emptiness of the sodden
fields to the south-east of Ravenna between the Canale del Molino and
the Fiumi Uniti.
The lonely and melancholy church of S. Maria in Porto fuori is a
basilica consisting of three naves which formed a part of the original
church of the Blessed Pietro, and a presbytery, apse, and chapels
which are of the thirteenth century. There we see some frescoes of a
very beautiful and early character which have been erroneously
attributed to Giotto, and as erroneously it might seem to Peter of
Rimini.
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