Bacini

However, some researchers point to few immured cups found in the buildings of Ostia Antica and Islamic architecture that extensively used the glazed ceramics (but not bacini).

In Northern Italy bacini can be found both on the coast and inland, in Liguria, Veneto, Padua, Verona, Lombardy, Ticino (now in Switzerland), Piedmont, Emilia Romagna, Umbria, and Abruzzo.

[9] In Italy, the number of buildings decorated with immured bowls in a single city varies: 4-10 in Milan, Ferrara, Ravenna, Genoa, Lucca, Sassari, Ascoli Piceno, 15 in Pavia and Bologna, more than 20 in Rome and Pisa.

[3] The location of bacini in the building varied, but typically they were placed high up: at the clerestory level, in the blind arcades, on the sides of bell towers.

At this time, as part of the conservation work in Pisa, the bacini were removed from the buildings and replaced by replicas, an extensive catalog[14] was published in 1981 (superseded by a new book[15] in 2011).

[13] Graziella Berti [it] suggested that the bacini and the initial church construction were contemporaneous, as places were left for these decorations while the buildings were erected.

Most of the drawings involve geometric and floral shapes, some have Arabic writing or some resemblance of it, but there are also mythical and real animals (primarily birds), and a single human figure (at San Sisto).

[19] The other explanations include bacini being symbolic spoils of wars that Pisa successfully waged at the time,[20] emblems of the Crusader/trader mentality,[21] declaration of prosperity and rivalry with other maritime republics.

[3] The Byzantine architecture mostly did not adorn the church facades with colors: the appearance of the buildings was either grayish-white (stone, marble, mortar) or red (bricks).

[24] The biggest group of churches with bacini in the area, a total of 291, is located in Crete, almost evenly split between Rethymnon, Herakleion, Lasithi, and Chania,[25] primarily in the hinterland.