San Sisto is a church in Pisa

Pisa

Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

, Tuscany

Tuscany

Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....

, Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

.

It was consecrated in 1133 but previously it had been already used as the seat of the most important notary act of the Pisan commune

Republic of Pisa

The Republic of Pisa was a de facto independent state centered on the Tuscan city of Pisa during the late tenth and eleventh centuries. It rose to become an economic powerhouse, a commercial center whose merchants dominated Mediterranean and Italian trade for a century before being surpassed and...

. It was built in a Pisane-Romanesque

Romanesque architecture

Romanesque architecture is an architectural style of Medieval Europe characterised by semi-circular arches. There is no consensus for the beginning date of the Romanesque architecture, with proposals ranging from the 6th to the 10th century. It developed in the 12th century into the Gothic style,...

 style in stone.
The façade is divide in three parts divided by pilaster strips, with a mullioned window and arches in the upper part which continues on the whole exterior. Notable is the typical local decoration with Islamic ceramic basins from the 10th-11th centuries (copies; the original are in the Museum of St. Matthew in the city).

The interior has a nave and two aisles, divided by columns with ancient Roman capitals, with hut-shaped ceiling. It houses also an Arabic tombstone, the copy of a 14th century Madonna with Child and the rudder

Rudder

A rudder is a device used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, aircraft or other conveyance that moves through a medium . On an aircraft the rudder is used primarily to counter adverse yaw and p-factor and is not the primary control used to turn the airplane...

of a Pisane galley (13th-14th centuries).

External links

• Page with detailed photo of the decoration