Basilica di Santa Maria in Foro Claudio (l'Episcopio)
Carinola (CE)
Hidden gemSacred art
The story
Out in the fields, an Early Christian basilica with fourteen reused Roman columns and an apse where a Byzantine Madonna has been staring at you for a thousand years. On the walls, medieval peasants and craftsmen painted at work: the only portrait left of the people who lived here.
Access
FREE but BY BOOKING ONLY (parish priest of Ventaroli)
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A Gothic-Catalan borgo (old village) left almost intact and almost ignored: the bell tower with its dome of yellow and green majolica, the Renaissance loggia of Casa Novelli, and at the top the ruins of count Riccardo's castle.
- Sacred art
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Tradition holds that Francis of Assisi himself stopped here, coming down the road that led to the sea. A silent cloister at the foot of Monte Massico, where time seems to have halted in the thirteenth century.
More gems: Sacred art
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.