The church of San Francesco d'Assisi is a Catholic place of worship in Matera in the Baroque style, located in the central Piazza San Francesco. The first nucleus of the church was an ancient hypogeum church dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, which can still be visited by accessing through a trap door from a chapel and containing a fresco depicting Pope Urban II's visit to Matera in 1093. The name can be traced back to a visit to the church reported by some chroniclers of St. Francis of Assisi in 1218. The church has undergone numerous transformations, with an original structure dating back to the first half of the thirteenth century, enlarged in the fifteenth century, to take on the current state in the XVIII century with the construction of the Baroque façade by the architects Vito Valentino and Tommaso Pennetta. The baroque façade houses three statues in the upper part, with the Immaculate in the center and San Francesco and Sant'Antonio on the sides. The interior has a single nave with a flat painted ceiling, along which side chapels open. The nave ends with the quadrangular apse, introduced by a pointed arch and covered with a cross vault; Behind the back wall, behind the main altar, is the choir, whose parapet is decorated with a 16th century polyptych with nine tempera paintings on wood, attributed to Lazzaro Bastiani. Above it there is the pipe organ, built by Fratelli Ruffatti in 1955 and modified by them in 1978, with electric transmission and with 22 registers on two manuals and pedal.

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