During the 1920s, Los Angeles went on a building spree to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of migrants from across the United States, and the world, drawn to the City of Angels.  These new homes, shopping centers, houses of worship, universities, and cemeteries were built in a range of architectural styles, the discoordinate nature of which was evoked by Nathanael West in the opening pages of “The Day of the Locust” (1939).  Among these was St John’s Episcopal Church (as of 2008, Cathedral), a tufa, steel and concrete reimagining of the late eleventh-century church of San Pietro in Tuscania (VT). Designed by the Los Angeles-based architects Francis Pierpont and Walter Swindell Davis and with façade carvings by the Italian sculptor Cartiano Scarpitta and stained glass windows from Judson Studios, the basilica was consecrated in 1925 to replace a neo-Gothic edifice dedicated only 30 years prior; it has since been recognized as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and entered in the US National Register of Historic Places. Part of a broader research project on medievalizing architecture in interwar California, this paper represents the first scholarly investigation of the process and ramifications of the decision to model St. John’s on San Pietro. This Italian heritage joins St. John’s to such other LA buildings as UCLA’s Royce Hall, the church of Santa Monica, and Forest Lawn’s Great Mausoleum that leveraged medieval Italy to fashion Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan city with roots more in Europe than the New World.