“In quel loco fui 10, Pier Damiano,
  e Pietro Peccator fu nella casa
  Di nostra Donna in sul lito Adriano,"[2]

is commented upon in one of Boccaccio’s letters to his friend Petrarch.[3] It is true both Peters were of Ravenna, but whereas Blessed Pietro Il Peccatore was of the Onesti family, as was S. Romuald, S. Pietro Damiano was not; the last died in 1072 at Faenza as we have seen, the first as we may think in 1119.

[Footnote 1:  It is I confess doubtful whether Pietro degli Onesti was ever called Il Peccatore till a later epoch.  The authenticity of the letters in which he so styles himself is open to question and the inscription on his tomb is it seems of the fifteenth century.]

[Footnote 2:  Paradiso, xxi. 121-123.  “In quel loco” refers to Fonte Avellana.]

[Footnote 3:  Cf.  Corazzini, Lettere edite ed inedite di Giovanni Boccaccio (Firenze, 1877), p. 307.]

Now though all were famous and all were of Ravenna it is the last and I suppose the least of them who is most closely connected with the city.  The others went away and won, not only great place in the world, but an everlasting fame.  Blessed Pietro Il Peccatore stayed in Ravenna and built there outside the walls in the marsh between Ravenna and Classe the great home of Our Lady, S. Maria in Porto fuori.  About the middle of the eleventh century, Dr Ricci tells us, certain religious retired into the solitude by the shore of the Adriatic and there built a little church or oratory that was called S. Maria in fossula.  In this act we may certainly see the example of S. Romuald.  But about 1096 there joined himself to them Pietro degli Onesti called Il Peccatore, and perhaps because he was of the Onesti he built there a new and a larger church, it is said in fulfilment of a vow made, as was Galla Placidia’s, in a storm at sea.  It is this church which in great part we still see, with additions of the thirteenth century, a lonely and beautiful thing in the emptiness of the sodden fields to the south-east of Ravenna between the Canale del Molino and the Fiumi Uniti.

The lonely and melancholy church of S. Maria in Porto fuori is a basilica consisting of three naves which formed a part of the original church of the Blessed Pietro, and a presbytery, apse, and chapels which are of the thirteenth century.  There we see some frescoes of a very beautiful and early character which have been erroneously attributed to Giotto, and as erroneously it might seem to Peter of Rimini.

[Illustration:  INTERIOR OF S. MARIA IN PORTO FUORI]