In A.D. 700 Cunibert descended to Lucca, which had then become a Longobardic town, and interested himself in the building of a church to the three saints, Stephen, Laurence, and Vincent; it afterwards became S. Fredianus. The actual patron may not have been Cunibert himself, but his majordomo Faulus, who probably was his vice-gerent there. Two ancient deeds in the adjoining monastery of St. Vincent and S. Fredianus, dated respectively 685 and 686, prove that Faulus restored and richly endowed the monastery, and that Bishop Felix afterwards conceded to the Abbot Babbinus and his monks, a diploma confirming the munificence of Faulus. The monastery was, so say the chroniclers, originally built by S. Frediano, Bishop of Lucca, in the sixth century, and that, when the first unconverted Longobards came down and drove him out and destroyed his cathedral, he fled for some years, but on his return he built another church outside the town with a monastery attached. In this he availed himself of the sculptured stones and columns of the ancient Roman amphitheatre, erected in Lucca by Vibius in the time of Trajan. This was the monastery which was restored by Faulus. When the bones of S. Fredianus were removed to it, in the time of the Bishop Giovanni II., the church became known as S. Fredianus. The church built in Cunibert's time was not by any means the fine building we see now, though, as in Monza, the form of the old building may be perceived. The ancient apse which has been traced in the course of some excavations, is a fifth smaller than the present one, and it is conjectured that the old church, if turned the same way, would have ended near where the present pulpit stands; and there was a portico in front of it which is mentioned in some ancient MSS. The church was certainly differently orientalized, following the symbolic formula that the choir should face the east; for the excavations disclosed part of the columns of the nave, buried under the present presbytery at the back. The circular walls of the choir were retraced in front of the present altar, and it was proved that the wall was not continued where the semi-circle of the apse opens; whereas if the church had been in the same direction it now takes, the walls would have been continued to the length of the nave. Cav. Cordero di S. Quintino, in his _Disamine su di alcuni monumenti Lucchesi_, 1815, was the first to draw attention to the reversed plan of the old church, which the recent excavations have proved. He states that it was in the form of a Latin cross, had a nave, and four aisles and transepts; that its choir was at the west end, facing east, its façade on the east. It is a misfortune that its origin cannot be precisely proved, as the archives of S. Fredianus must have been burned in 1596, when the convent, with other houses, was set on fire, even if they had survived the former sacking and burning of the Ghibellines, under Uguccione della Faggiola in 1314.