San Giovanni de Butris

According to an ancient name, the church was called of S. Giovanni de Buttis (Rationes Decimarum), a name perhaps deriving from the two arches (buttis) forming the Roman bridge on which, around the fifteenth century, this church dedicated to St. John the Baptist was built and was owned by the Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. The path of the river was soon diverted to safeguard the church and the house of the Commendatore from the frequent floods that interested, very frequently, the entire valley of the Naia.

It was part, up to the unity of Italy, of the rich heritage of the “assets due to the Commandery of St. John of Eudes for the Sacred Religion of Jerusalem.”
Since then this church has remained in total abandonment, devastated by the wear and tear of time and by the neglect and theft of men.
The “ancient” crucifix (early 14th century) is from the Umbra school and predates the present church and was highly revered. It was transported in 1888, accompanied by an immense crowd of acquaspartani, in the Church of S. Francesco and placed on the right altar entering. The same is now found in the Church of St. Cecilia.

The Church of St. John of Budes, of Romanesque style, is one of the many present in the territory that overlooks the Flaminia da Carsulae in Massa Martana. We want to remember the closest ones as S. Maria Assunta in Quadrelli, S. Bartolomeo in Casteltodino, S. Lucia always in the territory of Acquasparta to the east of the Flaminia, the abbey of Villa S. Faustino, S. Maria in Pantano and SS. Terenzio and Fidenzio in the Municipality of Massa Martana.

This sacred Christian building built on a bridge of a Roman consular road over two hundred years before the Christian era, reminds us of the laborious and fertile union, painstakingly realized between Christianity and paganism, between the Latin-Christian world and the Germanic world.
After all, in this “unity”, we find the cultural identity of these lands whose humus is Latin and Christian matured in the crucible produced with the impact with the different barbarian ethnic groups.