With its stunning façade rising in tiers like a decorated wedding cake and its placement in a broad piazza in the historic center of the city, it's no wonder that San Michele in Foro is so often mistaken for Lucca's cathedral. Standing on the site of the Roman forum, the church of San Michele was built from the 12th to the 14th centuries, and its façade of carved and inlaid marble is breathtaking, seldom repeating a design on its four layers of intricately worked pillars. Towering above them is a larger-than-life-size Archangel Michael. The Romanesque character of the interior has been preserved and is highlighted by the terra-cotta Madonna and Child by Andrea della Robbia and in the left transept, a 15th-century painted panel of saints Roch, Sebastian, Jerome, and Helen, one of Filippo Lippi's finest works.