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About the end of the century Ursus had been bishop and had built the great cathedral church, the Basilica Ursiana, dedicated in honour of the Resurrection, with its five naves and fifty-six columns of marble, its schola cantorum in the midst, and its mosaics, all of which were finally and utterly destroyed in 1733.
Only the apse with its beautiful great mosaic remained for a few years till at last it too was destroyed. Thus the church we have in place of the old Basilica Ursiana is a building of the eighteenth century, and all that we care for in it is the fragments that are to be found there of its glorious predecessor. These are few in number and of little account.
Within, is a good picture by Marco Palmezzano: a Pieta with S. John Baptist; while the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament is decorated by him and his pupils. It is obvious, then, that very little remains to us of the original Basilica Ursiana; nor can we reckon among that little the beautiful round and isolated campanile.
Agnellus gives us a fairly full account of this church, which consisted of five naves divided and upheld by four rows of fifty-six columns of precious marble from the temple of Jupiter. That the church was approached by steps we learn from Agnellus in his life of S. Exuperantius, for he there tells us that Felix the patrician was killed "on the steps of the Ecclesia Ursiana."
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