Once the interior restoration had been completed, plans were made to renovate the bell tower and the façade, on which Giuseppe Partini had opened a rose window. Among the various proposals the one made by architects Vittorio Mariani and Gaetano Ceccherelli prevailed: therefore, between 1894 and 1913, the fifteenth-century portal with the sculpture of Saint Francis was dismantled leaving only the brick façade. The portal, attributed to the artist
Francesco di Giorgio Martini and now the frame of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina’s portrait, was moved to the church’s nave while the sculpture of the saint was placed in the transept.
The façade was completed with a new monumental entrance and four sculptures of the Evangelists, made by Amalia Dupré, Vittorio Mariani and Gaetano Ceccherelli, were placed around the rose window.
The bell tower, built by Paolo Posi in 1763, maintains its original structure but the brickwork has been exposed. In the nineties frescoes from Porta Romana and Porta Pispini were moved to the church's counter- façade and in 1997 some seventeenth-century paintings, made after the fire of 1655, were positioned in the nave. The paintings, kept in the art gallery’s storerooms, have been placed in simple metal supports similar to altars.
In the year 2000, in line with urban requalification policies, the entire area in front of the church, which was part of the ancient friary whose structures now are completely disconnected, was recuperated. The friary was built around four cloisters: three reserved for the novitiate, for general study and for the monastic community (and later used by the University of Siena), while the fourth, built in the sixteenth century for the Holy Inquisition, was later destroyed and occupied by the Police Station. The Oratory of San Bernardino, once a meeting place for the Saint’s Company which currently houses the Diocesan Museum of Sacred Art, also overlooks the square. In one of
Sano di Pietro’s works, representing Saint Bernardino preaching in Saint Francis Square, we can see what the church façade and the square looked like in the fifteenth century. The square has always been a focal point in the construction of Franciscan churches, an essential element where peopled gathered and where the Word of God was preached. And it is in Saint Bernardino’s honour that a decorative pattern has been made in front of the oratory dedicated to this Saint: the stylised motif evokes the circle of rays that, with the IHS monogram, embodys the Sienese Saint’s iconography.