Abbazia di Sant'Angelo in Formis
Capua (CE)
KnownSacred art
The story
On the slopes of Monte Tifata, above an ancient temple of Diana, the basilica preserves cycles of medieval frescoes that cover the walls like a painted story.
More gems in Capua
- History & archaeology
Museo Campano (Matres Matutae)
Capua (CE)
In Capua the Museo Campano lines up the Matres Matutae, dozens of tufo mothers seated with children in their laps: fertility deities worshipped here in ancient Capua.
- Sacred art
Chiesa di San Michele a Corte e cripta longobarda
Capua (CE)
Palatine chapel of the Lombard princes, 10th century: you enter beneath a triple window of palm-leaf capitals and go down into a crypt that turns around a single squat column, where frescoes that resurfaced only in 1876 still survive.
CastlesCastello delle Pietre
Capua (CE)
The Norman keep of 1062 is made out of the Anfiteatro Campano: limestone blocks torn from the gladiators' tiers and reassembled into a fortress. Capua devoured itself in order to survive.
More gems: Sacred art
Sacred artCappella Sansevero (Cristo Velato)
Napoli (NA)
Beneath a veil of marble that still seems to breathe, Sanmartino's Cristo Velato rests in the chapel's half-light, and the whiteness of the stone deceives every eye.
Sacred artDuomo di Napoli
Napoli
Three times a year the city holds its breath as the blood of San Gennaro waits to liquefy, among Gothic naves and the gold of the chapel devoted to him.
Sacred artCappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro
Napoli
Behind a bronze gate lie silverware, gems and the jewel-studded mitre of the saint: a treasure heaped up over centuries by the devotion of Naples.
Sacred artChiesa del Gesù Nuovo
Napoli
The facade of pyramid-cut piperno stone hides symbols carved into the blocks, while inside the Baroque bursts out in marble and in the memory of the physician Giuseppe Moscati.
Sacred artChiostro di Santa Chiara
Napoli
A garden of pillars clad in yellow and blue majolica, where lemon pergolas and eighteenth-century scenes painted on the tiles keep the noise of the city at bay.
- Sacred art
Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco
Via Tribunali 39
Bronze skulls stand guard at the entrance, and down in the hypogeum the cult of the anime pezzentelle (adopted souls of the dead) still leaves flowers and prayers beside abandoned crania.