Pieve di San Giorgio di Valpolicella

Pieve di San Giorgio opening hours and Mass times

The official tourism portal of the Valpolicella gives the address as Piazza della Pieve 22, in the frazione of San Giorgio di Valpolicella, comune of Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella. The church is open every day from 7.00 to 20.00 on its summer timetable and from 8.00 to 17.00 on its winter timetable. Visitors enter from the cloister, and visits are not possible during Mass.

Mass is celebrated on Sundays and public holidays at 11.00 and on Wednesdays at 9.15, so a Sunday visit is best planned for the early morning or the afternoon. The portal lists the parish priest's telephone as +39 045 6861098 for questions about the church.

The portal does not give an entrance charge for the church, and none of the sources consulted mentions one. The Antiquarium next door, described below, keeps separate hours and closes for the winter. San Giorgio is a small borgo built of the local white limestone, with narrow courtyards and stone houses grouped around the Pieve; the belvedere in the central square and the terrace a few steps from the church look across the Valpolicella towards Verona and Lake Garda.

If you are combining the visit with tastings, Villa Serego Alighieri at Gargagnago sits at the foot of the hill below the bell tower, and the wine estates of Sant'Ambrogio and Fumane are close by.

The Lombard ciborium and its inscriptions

The ciborium is the stone canopy over the high altar. It was reassembled in 1923 from authentic pieces with modern additions, as Pierpaolo Brugnoli recorded in the Annuario Storico della Valpolicella (Brugnoli, 1994). Its inscriptions, carved on the small columns, record that it was built by the master Orso (Ursus) with his disciples Iuventino and Iuviano, in the reign of the Lombard king Liutprand, when Domenico was bishop of Verona.

The critical edition of the inscriptions by Andrea Brugnoli and Francesco Cortellazzo counts three inscriptions on three columns, which Alessandro Da Lisca used in the 1920s for a reconstruction that he himself admitted was arbitrary; a further fragment of column is kept in the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona (Brugnoli and Cortellazzo, 2012). The first inscription says that the ciborium was built from the gifts to the altar of Saint John the Baptist, in the time of King Liutprand and Bishop Domenico, when the priests Vidaliano and Tancol were custodians and Refol was gastaldo, and it is signed by the deacon Gondelme. The authors date it to between 712 and 740, or perhaps more precisely to between 712 and 736.

The tourism portal describes the carving as knots, animals and plants, among them vine shoots. Some summaries give 712 as a single date; the published edition supports only a range within Liutprand's reign.

The church, the bell tower and the cloister

The wine road association describes the Pieve as of barbarian and Roman origin, probably built near a pagan temple. The church has three naves, with apses on both short sides, which is unusual. The bell tower and the cloister date from the twelfth century, and the capitals of the cloister columns are each worked in a different shape, carved with animal and plant motifs. Among the paintings inside the association lists a Resurrection of Christ attributed to Palma il Giovane and a Martyrdom of Saint George by the painter Lanceni.

The tourism portal adds frescoes on the rectangular piers of the right-hand nave from the fourteenth century and earlier frescoes from the eleventh century, now worn. It notes that the base of one column in the left nave is made from the altar of an ancient temple, and that the cloister on the east side keeps three of its four original colonnades, with a well in the centre. The church is built of blocks of local limestone, which gives it its plain, archaic look.

The sources do not agree on the founding date. The Regione del Veneto's visitor app says the church was probably founded in the seventh century and rebuilt in Romanesque style in the twelfth, while the tourism portal dates the complex to the eighth century and gives the year 712. Both agree on the twelfth-century cloister.

The Antiquarium and the Iron Age excavations

Beside the church is the Antiquarium, the archaeological museum of the Pieve, founded in 1992 in the parsonage. The University of Padua's archaeological atlas of the Veneto describes four rooms: prehistoric and protohistoric finds from around the church, including flint tools, a Late Bronze Age axe and objects from a village of the fifth and fourth centuries BC; Roman finds from the pagus of the Arusnates; Jurassic ammonites and ten Roman inscribed stones, the first of them the oldest Roman inscription in the Valpolicella (first century BC); and fossil fish from Monte Pastello.

Behind the eastern apse is the archaeological area of an Iron Age production settlement of the fifth to third centuries BC. Of the eight structures found, three are shown to visitors: a workshop for bone and horn, a metal workshop and a cistern. The first finds date from 1975 and the systematic excavation from 1985 to 1989. The village stands at about 350 metres above sea level.

VisitVerona, the Verona tourist board, lists the museum's hours as Monday, Wednesday and Friday 15.00 to 19.00 and Tuesday and Thursday 9.00 to 13.00, with weekend afternoons from May to the second Sunday of November. From the third Sunday of November to Easter it is closed and opens only to groups booked in advance, on +39 346 3202167. The same page also carries a notice that the museum is temporarily closed, so call before you go.

San Giorgio Ingannapoltron: the borgo and the view

San Giorgio di Valpolicella is a frazione of Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella, and the wine road association records that it joined the club of I Borghi più belli d'Italia in November 2015. Its other name, Ingannapoltron, means roughly "it fools the lazy": according to the tourism portal, the village always looks close from below, but the climb up was once long and tiring. The same page mentions the Festa delle Fae, a traditional historical re-enactment held in the village.

The association calls San Giorgio the place richest in Roman inscriptions in the Valpolicella, and perhaps in the whole province of Verona; many are now in the Museo Maffeiano and the archaeological museum at the Roman theatre in Verona.

From the terrace near the Pieve, the tourism portal describes a view over Sant'Ambrogio to the terraced hill of La Grola, and on clear days to Lake Garda and the peninsula of Sirmione, with the eastern Valpolicella and the historic centre of Verona to the other side. On the way into the village stands the Cipresso di Pietra, a stone monument raised in 1929 for the eleven young stonecutters who died on the evening of 6 June 1927, when a lorry carrying 13 of them and a load of stone overturned at the Fontana Vecia bend.

The quarries on La Grola and at Coali are reminders of the stone trade for which Sant'Ambrogio is known.

Getting to San Giorgio di Valpolicella

ATV's per-locality index lists no bus stop for the borgo of San Giorgio di Valpolicella. The nearest stop is the one listed as Gargagnago Bure, on line 103, which runs from Monday to Saturday from Verona railway station (stand D2) and on Sundays and public holidays from Porta San Giorgio in Verona; the winter timetable is valid from 28 September 2026. The Verona stop called Porta S.Giorgio on the same timetable is a city gate in Verona, unrelated to the village.

From Gargagnago, the wine road association describes a marked fitness trail, the percorso della salute, that starts behind the Gargagnago church and climbs through the hillside to the old borgo of San Giorgio.

The railway station of Domegliara-Sant'Ambrogio is also in the comune: a Trenitalia search for Wednesday 18 November 2026 returned regional trains of 15 minutes from Verona Porta Nuova at 3.10 EUR, and line 103 connects the station with Gargagnago. For fares and timetables in detail see getting to Valpolicella from Verona, and for the footpaths of the area see cycling and walking in Valpolicella. The Pieve sits in the Valpolicella Classico, the wine area described on our page on the Valpolicella zones; a day that adds a tasting can follow one of the wine tours from Verona.