A week into our Italy vacation this summer the kids had burned out on architecture and hill towns so one morning Leslie and I left them to their own (electronic) devices and set out to find a curious early Umbrian building I’d read about. Our map turned out to be wrong and it took us a while to get there, but the Umbrian countryside is not a bad place to get lost in.

The Tempietto del Clitunno, our destination, is an elegant little building perched above a spring-fed pool. The Roman writer Pliny the Younger described the spring waters as “so transparently clear that you may count the shining pebbles.” A millennium and a half later Palladio visited on an architectural fact-finding tour. He measured the Tempietto and drew it up, convinced it was a Roman temple.

Palladio got it wrong but it’s easy to see why. Though it was built as a Christian chapel, the Tempietto looks like a classical temple, complete with podium, modillion cornice, and Corinthian columns with imbricated and swirl-fluted shafts. The Tempietto is essentially one of the last classical buildings, a lineal descendant of the Parthenon and countless other Greek and Roman temples.

Yet the evidence suggests the Tempietto may have been built as late as ca. 700 A.D., long after the end of the Roman Empire, probably for one of the Longobard bigwigs who ruled much of Italy at the time. It’s a testament to the staying power of classical culture, which resident barbarians like the Longobards (“Long Beards”) were keen to emulate for the prestige it bestowed. The quick and easy way to get prestige was to steal it—the columns are spolia (recycled elements) from some unknown Roman building or ruins.

One of the things that made the building so fun for Leslie and me was we could get right up close to the detail. Just like when we study historic buildings in the US, except this one was over a thousand years older. The apse is painted with frescos of Saints Peter and Paul dressed in toga-like white robes and there are carvings of grape clusters, flowers, and foliated crosses in the front and back pediments, the work of stonecarvers skilled in the classical tradition. So much for the culturally benighted Dark Ages, at least in this corner of Italy.

The artisans and their patron are unknown and will probably never be known. The Tempietto is so tangible, so present, and yet so enigmatic. Speaking as someone who devotes himself to solving building mysteries, that is both humbling and exhilarating. The world needs more mystery.

Tempietto del Clitunno, Umbria, Italy