Sacred art
124 places
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 artSanta 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.
◆ Sacred artChiesa di Santa Luciella ai Librai (teschio con le orecchie)
Napoli
In the crypt of a small church rediscovered in the maze of the Librai rests the skull with ears, which the faithful believed could listen to their prayers.
Sacred artPio Monte della Misericordia
Via Tribunali
Above the altar of an octagonal church still hangs, exactly where Caravaggio painted it, his Sette opere di Misericordia: a single canvas holding all the charity in the world.
Sacred artSan Gregorio Armeno
Napoli
The street of the presepe (nativity scene) masters, where terracotta shepherds are shaped all year round and the alley smells of glue and wood beneath Baroque bell towers.
◆ Sacred artSant'Anna dei Lombardi
via Toledo
Eight terracotta figures mourn the dead Christ with faces of piercing grief, while in the sacristy frescoed by Vasari the ceiling fills with constellations and virtues.
◆ Sacred artSan Giovanni a Carbonara
Napoli
A double forceps-shaped flight of stairs leads up to the church, inside which the monumental tomb of King Ladislao rises like a tower of marble.
Sacred artGuglie di San Gennaro
Decumani
The oldest of the Neapolitan spires, raised in thanksgiving to the patron saint who is said to have halted the lava of Vesuvius, his bronze statue keeping watch beside the Duomo.
Sacred artCimitero delle Fontanelle / Museo delle Capuzzelle
Rione Sanità
Thousands of nameless skulls line the old tufo (volcanic tuff) quarry: the capuzzelle (little skulls) that Neapolitans adopted and cared for, in the tender, desperate cult of the souls of purgatory.
◆ Sacred artCatacombe di San Gaudioso
Basilica della Sanità
Beneath the basilica of the Sanità, early Christian catacombs where noble dead were portrayed with their real skull set above the painted body: death put on stage.
◆ Sacred artChiesa di Santa Maria della Sanità
Sanità
Fra Nuvolo's basilica keeps watch over the quarter it gives its name to: dedicated to San Vincenzo, 'o Munacone to Neapolitans, it holds the Catacombe di San Gaudioso beneath it.
◆ Sacred artBasilica di San Gennaro extra Moenia
Sanità
Outside the ancient walls, beside the catacombs that once held the body of San Gennaro: one of the oldest churches in Naples, in the shade of the Capodimonte hill.
◆ Sacred artParco Vergiliano a Piedigrotta (tombe di Virgilio e Leopardi)
Mergellina
A park climbing at Piedigrotta holds the columbarium known as the tomb of Virgil and, just below, that of Leopardi: two poets in the greenery, above the traffic.
Sacred artCertosa di San Giacomo
Capri
Silent cloisters and fourteenth-century walls of a charterhouse facing the sea, where time seems to have stopped among white arches and gardens.
◆ Sacred artEremo di Cetrella
Anacapri
A small Marian hermitage tucked among the rocks below Monte Solaro, reached on foot through the scent of the scrub and the silence of the heights.
Sacred artChiesa di San Michele (pavimento maiolicato)
Anacapri
A majolica floor tells of Adam and Eve driven out of the Garden of Eden, to be admired from above to take in the full sweep of its eighteenth-century colours.
Sacred artTerra Murata
Procida
The ancient core of Procida climbs the yellow tufo (volcanic tuff) headland, between defensive walls and narrow alleys, suspended between the little harbour of Corricella and the horizon of the bay.
Sacred artAbbazia di San Michele
Procida
Behind the walls of Terra Murata, the abbey dedicated to its patron Michael guards paintings, an antique presepe (nativity scene) and catacombe carved into the tufo, its vault turned towards the sea.
Sacred artChiesa del Soccorso
Forio
White and plain on the headland of Forio, the sailors' church faces the open sea: here, among majolica tiles and ex voto, people come to wait for one of the island's most famous sunsets.
Sacred artChiesa di Santa Maria Assunta
Positano (SA)
In the heart of Positano, the dome of yellow and green majolica rises above the roofs; inside, the Byzantine icon of the black Madonna watches over the village facing the sea.
Sacred artVilla Cimbrone — Terrazza dell'Infinito
Ravello
A balcony of marble busts suspended over the gulf, where the gaze meets nothing at all: Gore Vidal called it the most beautiful view in the world.
Sacred artDuomo di Amalfi
Amalfi
At the top of a steep stairway, the striped Arab-Norman façade; beneath the altar rest the relics of Saint Andrew, brought here from Constantinople.
Sacred artChiostro del Paradiso
Amalfi
Interlaced Moorish arches and palms that filter the light: a thirteenth-century cemetery made for the nobles of Amalfi, as silent as a garden of the East.
Sacred artConca dei Marini
Conca
A handful of white houses sheer above the sea; below the village opens the Grotta dello Smeraldo, where a ceramic presepe (nativity scene) rests underwater.
◆ Sacred artScala e frazione Minuta
Scala
The oldest village on the coast, stretched out facing Ravello; in the hamlet of Minuta a small church keeps its frescoed crypt in silence.
◆ Sacred artAbbazia rupestre di Santa Maria de Olearia
Maiori
Carved into the rock along the road to Salerno, an abbey of three chapels stacked one above the other; fragments of Byzantine frescoes hold on where oil was once pressed.
◆ Sacred artHortus Conclusus
Benevento
In the garden of the San Domenico convent, the bronzes of Mimmo Paladino: a horse in a golden mask among ancient capitals and fountains, in a garden suspended between myth and meditation.
Sacred artSantuario di Montevergine
Mercogliano
Clinging to the Partenio, the sanctuary guards the dark Madonna the pilgrims call Mamma Schiavona; you climb by funicular, through beech woods and mist, to look out over the whole of Irpinia.
◆ Sacred artPolicastro Bussentino
Santa Marina (SA)
On the gulf that bears its name, the ancient Greek Pyxous keeps its medieval walls and its thirteenth-century cathedral, where the Bussento comes to meet the sea among the houses.
◆ Sacred artBadia di Pattano (San Filadelfo)
Vallo della Lucania (SA)
A few steps from Vallo, the most intact Italo-Greek monastery in the South keeps in the chapel of San Filadelfo tenth-century Byzantine frescoes and a surviving tower.
◆ Sacred artBasiliche paleocristiane di Cimitile
Cimitile (NA)
Around the tomb of Saint Felix, a rare complex of early Christian basilicas layered over the centuries preserves mosaics and frescoes, the memory of Paulinus' Christian Nola.
Sacred artSantuario Madonna dell'Arco
Sant'Anastasia (NA)
At the foot of Vesuvius, the Marian sanctuary draws every Easter Monday the fujenti dressed in white, among walls covered with ex voto and promises of grace.
Sacred artSantuario di San Gerardo Maiella
Materdomini, Caposele (AV)
At Materdomini pilgrims climb to San Gerardo Maiella, the saint to whom mothers entrust pregnancy and childbirth, among ex voto offerings and August crowds.
◆ Sacred artSantuario di Santa Filomena
Mugnano del Cardinale (AV)
At Mugnano rests Santa Filomena, the young martyr brought here from the Roman catacombe in 1805, drawing pilgrims who fill the town on 13 August.
◆ Sacred artConvento di San Francesco a Folloni
Montella (AV)
In the woods of Montella they tell of a sack of bread that appeared on the snow without footprints: the relic, dated to the thirteenth century, is still kept in the convent.
◆ Sacred artAbellinum romana + specus martirum
Atripalda (AV)
At Atripalda the Roman Abellinum surfaces and, beneath the church, the Specus Martyrum: the crypt where the first Christian martyrs of Irpinia were laid.
Sacred artCatacombe di San Gennaro
Napoli (NA)
In the Sanità district open two levels of frescoed galleries where San Gennaro was buried, the largest catacomba in the South carved into the yellow tufo (volcanic tuff).
Sacred artCertosa e Museo Nazionale di San Martino
Napoli (NA)
Beside Sant'Elmo, the Carthusian monastery weaves together marble cloisters and a sumptuous church, keeper of the most famous collection of Neapolitan presepi (nativity scenes).
Sacred artCertosa di San Lorenzo (Padula)
Padula (SA)
One of the largest monastic complexes in Europe, with a great cloister that seems never to end and an elliptical staircase suspended in the void.
Sacred artChiesa di Santa Sofia
Benevento (BN)
A Lombard church with a star-shaped plan, a World Heritage site, where columns and arches trace an unusual geometry left almost intact for over a thousand years.
◆ Sacred artAbbazia del Goleto
Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi (AV)
Among the fields of upper Irpinia, the ruins of the abbey founded by Saint Guglielmo da Vercelli open to the sky: the Febronia tower, the silence and the golden stone at sunset.
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Santa Maria de' Olearia
Maiori (SA)
Carved into the rock along the coast of Maiori, the little cave abbey holds eleventh-century frescoes in the grotto where oil was once pressed: half-light, silence and Byzantium.
◆ Sacred artGrotta di San Michele (Faicchio)
Faicchio (BN)
On Monte Monaco di Gioia a natural cavity preserves the Lombard cult of the archangel, with frescoes of Byzantine flavour faded by damp and a silence that tastes of rock.
◆ Sacred artSantuario della Madonna dei Lattani
Roccamonfina (CE)
Among ancient chestnut groves, on the flank of an extinct volcano, the Franciscan convent founded by Saint Bernardino of Siena gathers the silence at eight hundred and fifty metres above Campania.
Sacred artDuomo di Ravello
Ravello (SA)
A pulpit borne by lions and clad in golden mosaics, the bronze door and the silence of a piazza suspended above the Costiera.
◆ Sacred artCattedrale dell'Annunziata di Vico
Vico Equense (NA)
Clinging to a spur of tufo (volcanic tuff) sheer above the sea, the Annunziata is the peninsula's only Gothic cathedral: inside, the half-light; outside, the Bay of Naples flung wide open.
Sacred artAbbazia di Sant'Angelo in Formis
Capua (CE)
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.
Sacred artBasilica di Santa Maria di Loreto
Forio (NA)
The mother church of Forio, with its majolica onion-domed bell tower, holds the canvases the people of Forio saved from raids by hiding them in the caves. Inside, gold and marble tell of a village that lived on wine and on fear.
Sacred artCattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta (Ischia Ponte)
Ischia (NA)
When the cathedral on the Castello was destroyed by English cannon fire in 1809, the bishops moved down to the valley and built a new one at the foot of the bridge. Beneath the present church survives the medieval crypt with frescoes of the Giottesque school.
◆ Sacred artChiesa di Sant'Antonio al Mortito
Casamicciola Terme (NA)
A small hillside church in a Casamicciola that has learnt to live with the ground that trembles and the mountain that slides down.
Sacred artEremo di San Nicola all'Epomeo
Serrara Fontana (NA)
A hermitage carved entirely out of the tufo just below the summit of the Epomeo. Here, in the eighteenth century, Giuseppe d'Argouth, commander of the Castello Aragonese, withdrew: after a life of arms he became a monk and died here, in a cell of rock.
◆ Sacred artChiesa di Santa Maria della Pieta'
Procida (NA)
The church that greets whoever lands at Marina Grande, with the Madonna the sailors saluted before leaving and thanked on their return. When they returned.
◆ Sacred artSanta Maria la Nova e la "tomba di Dracula"
Napoli (NA)
In the cloister stands a tomb with a dragon carved between two sphinxes. Since 2014 some swear that Vlad the Impaler lies inside, buried here by his daughter. Historians shake their heads. The dragon, though, is right there.
◆ Sacred artChiesa di Santa Maria del Pianto
Napoli (NA)
Built in 1657 over the mass graves of the plague that in a single year carried off half of Naples. Below lies the Grotta degli Sportiglioni: the tufo quarries where the plague victims were thrown by the thousand.
◆ Sacred artChiostro di San Marcellino e Festo
Napoli (NA)
A monastic cloister open on one side — an extremely rare thing — that suddenly gives onto the roofs of Naples, the sea and Vesuvius. At its centre, a baroque fountain with dolphins. And it is free.
◆ Sacred artCollegiata di San Michele Arcangelo (Solofra)
Solofra (AV)
From outside, an ordinary church; inside, an Irpinian Sistine Chapel: a coffered ceiling painted end to end by the Guarini, and looking up takes your breath away.
◆ Sacred artCollegiata di Santa Maria Assunta (Bagnoli)
Bagnoli Irpino (AV)
The wooden choir carved by Giovan Battista Ferrari is a forest of sculpted timber, a Baroque masterpiece hidden in a mountain village almost no tourist ever reaches.
◆ Sacred artSantuario del Santissimo Salvatore (Montella)
Montella (AV)
A sanctuary on a knoll that watches over the whole Calore valley: you climb up on foot, and the effort is part of the prayer.
◆ Sacred artBasilica di Santa Maria in Foro Claudio (l'Episcopio)
Carinola (CE)
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.
◆ Sacred artBasilica di Santa Maria di Cubulteria
Alvignano (CE)
Built between the 8th and 9th centuries, perhaps over a temple of the goddess Bona, it is the last surviving voice of Cubulteria: the Samnite city that dared to side with Hannibal, and that Rome first, then Saracen pirates, erased from the plain.
◆ Sacred artCripta di San Marco dei Sabariani
Benevento (BN)
In 2007 they thought they had found a cistern under via De Vita: it was the frescoed crypt of a church swallowed by the earthquake of 1688. A piece of the city resurfacing from underground.
◆ Sacred artChiesa di Santa Maria della Verita'
Benevento (BN)
An 18th-century church built right up against the Roman theatre: the pagan cavea serves as foundation for the nave. Stratigraphy of faith, in the open air.
Sacred artChiesa di Sant'Ilario a Port'Aurea
Benevento (BN)
A Lombard hall a stone's throw from the Arco di Traiano: inside, full-size casts of the frieze let you read close up what on the arch stays ten metres above your head.
Sacred artBasilica di San Bartolomeo Apostolo
Benevento (BN)
Since 839 Benevento has guarded — and disputed with Rome — the relics of the apostle flayed alive: the urn beneath the baroque altar is the most macabre and most devout heart of the city.
Sacred artSantuario della Madonna del Taburno
Bucciano (BN)
In 1401 a deaf-mute shepherdess, Agnese Pepe, is said to have heard the Madonna's voice coming from a cave on the Taburno. On the spot of the miracle a convent grew at 544 metres, today a silent balcony over the Valle Caudina.
Sacred artChiesa di San Menna
Sant'Agata de' Goti (BN)
Consecrated by Pope Paschal II in 1100, it holds one of the oldest Cosmatesque floors in the South. Yet the saint himself was a hermit of the Taburno who died in a cave: the luxury came only after him.
◆ Sacred artAbbazia di Santa Maria in Gruptis
Vitulano (BN)
Founded by Lombard princes around 940, abandoned after the 1688 earthquake and deconsecrated once it had become a bandits' lair: what remains is the three-storey tower and the apse thrown wide open onto the woods.
◆ Sacred artChiesa della Santissima Annunziata di Airola
Airola (BN)
Behind a façade designed by Vanvitelli, a Baroque coffered ceiling with three canvases by Finoglia and works by De Mura: a hidden picture gallery in a town nobody visits.
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Complesso dei Girolamini
Napoli
Beyond the white facade open one of the oldest libraries in Naples and a silent picture gallery, among wooden shelves and canvases hung by the Oratorian fathers.
- Sacred art
Immacolata
Decumani
In the heart of piazza del Gesù the Baroque spire soars straight up, an explosion of marble and statues crowned by the Immacolata turned toward the sky.
- Sacred art
San Domenico
Decumani
The square where the heart of Spaccanapoli beats, with the Baroque spire at its centre and the apse of the Angevin basilica that once held the rooms of San Tommaso.
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Basilica dell'Annunziata e Ruota degli Esposti
zona Forcella
The revolving wooden drum where for centuries newborns were laid in secret, and from which so many Neapolitans inherited the surname Esposito.
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Cimitero delle 366 Fosse
Poggioreale
Ferdinando Fuga drew here one pit for every day of the year: 366 anonymous graves for the city's poor, an Enlightenment geometry of dying beneath the hill of Poggioreale.
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Presepe Favoloso
Sanità
In the sacristy of the basilica of the Sanità the Scuotto brothers have lit up more than a hundred figures: a presepe (nativity scene) where eighteenth-century tradition and fairy tale interlace, suspended between the sacred and sheer wonder.
- Sacred art
Belvedere del Deserto — Sant'Agata sui Due Golfi
Massa Lubrense
From the old Carmelite convent the gaze takes in both gulfs at a single turn, Naples and Salerno, high above Sant'Agata.
- Sacred art
Villa Comunale di Sorrento e Chiesa/Chiostro di San Francesco
Sorrento
A terrace suspended over the gulf beside the fourteenth-century cloister of San Francesco, where interlacing arches and bougainvillea frame Vesuvius and the notes of the summer concerts.
- Sacred art
Madonna Nera
Positano
In the church of Santa Maria Assunta a Byzantine icon with a dark face keeps watch over the sea: legend says it was she who gave Positano its name.
- Sacred art
Monastero di Santa Rosa
Conca
Clinging to the cliff, the convent where the nuns invented the sfogliatella; among cells facing the deep blue, the recipe born behind the cloister still perfumes the air.
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Capo d'Orso
Maiori
A headland whose rocky profile makes it look like a bear; on the mountains behind it climbs the pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Avvocata.
- Sacred art
Duomo di San Matteo e cripta
Salerno
Beneath the Norman naves rest the relics of the evangelist Matthew, in a baroque crypt of marble and mirrors where the half-light turns to gold.
- Sacred art
Abbazia della SS. Trinità + Borgo Scacciaventi
Cava de' Tirreni (SA)
Between the unbroken arcades of Borgo Scacciaventi and the thousand-year-old Benedictine abbey pressed against the rock, Cava keeps two ways of crossing time sheltered from the wind.
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Battistero paleocristiano "La Rotonda"
Nocera Superiore (SA)
Circular in plan, one of the largest early Christian baptisteries in the West holds at its centre the font for immersion, beneath a double crown of ancient columns.
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Eboli: San Pietro alli Marmi e castello
Eboli (SA)
Above Eboli, the Romanesque San Pietro alli Marmi keeps its reused ancient columns, while the medieval castle watches over the Sele plain all the way to the sea.
- Sacred art
Aversa normanna
Aversa (CE)
First Norman county of the South, Aversa keeps in its centre a tangle of churches and bell towers: the medieval cathedral with its ambulatory marks the sacred heart of the city of the Normans.
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Abbazia del Santo Salvatore + Telesia
San Salvatore Telesino (BN)
Set in the plain of the Sannio, the Benedictine abbey of Santo Salvatore gathers the finds of ancient Telesia, the Roman and Samnite city abandoned after earthquakes and raids, and never risen again.
- Sacred art
Avellino città
Avellino (AV)
At the foot of the Partenio the city looks up at the Montevergine sanctuary above it, while downtown the Torre dell'Orologio marks the pace of Irpinia.
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Carro di Fontanarosa
Fontanarosa (AV)
Every 14 August at Fontanarosa a wooden obelisk clad in woven straw, tens of metres tall, is hauled by oxen toward the Madonna della Misericordia.
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Basilica paleocristiana dell'Annunziata
Prata di Principato Ultra (AV)
Outside the village, the basilica of Prata holds catacombe dug between the second and third centuries, among the oldest Christian traces in Irpinia.
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Solofra: Collegiata di San Michele
Solofra (AV)
In the town of tanning, the Collegiata di San Michele hides a painted wooden ceiling from the seventeenth century, the work of the Solofra painter Francesco Guarini.
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Abbazia della Ss. Trinità di Cava de' Tirreni
Cava de' Tirreni (SA)
Wedged into a rocky gorge above Cava de' Tirreni, the Benedictine abbey has prayed for over a thousand years among cloisters, catacombe (catacombs) and a library of ancient Lombard parchments.
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Cattedrale di Sant'Amato
Nusco (AV)
In the borgo (old village) of Nusco the cathedral guards in its crypt the remains of Sant'Amato and, recently resurfaced, thirteenth-century frescoes of a Nativity beneath the stone bell tower.
- Sacred art
Abbazia della Santissima Trinità
Cava de' Tirreni (SA)
Set into a wooded gorge above Cava, the Benedictine abbey founded by Sant'Alferio holds cloisters, a Lombard cemetery carved in the rock and an archive of parchments.
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Chiesa di Santa Maria Visitapoveri
Forio (NA)
Born as a confraternity that buried the poor and watched over the dying, Visitapoveri hides behind a sober façade the frescoes of Alfonso Di Spigna and eighteenth-century pews polished by centuries of elbows.
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Chiesa di Santa Maria al Monte
Forio (NA)
Clinging to the mountainside at 400 metres, it is the church of the mountain farmers and the starting point of the trails to the Epomeo. From here the whole island is in view, and it looks tiny.
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Chiesa di Santa Margherita Nuova
Procida (NA)
Built in the sixteenth century by Dominicans fleeing the Saracens, in the freezing winter of 1956 it collapsed in on itself when the great arches holding it up gave way. Only partly restored, it remains a shell hanging over the Corricella.
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Basilica di San Severo fuori le mura e il Figlio Velato di Jago
Napoli (NA)
In the chapel of the Bianchi, a marble child sleeps beneath a veil of stone: Jago's contemporary answer to the Cristo Velato, a stone's throw from the oldest catacombe (catacombs) in the city.
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Specus Martyrum (Chiesa di Sant'Ippolisto)
Atripalda (AV)
Below the church opens the cave of the martyrs: here, after the persecutions of Diocletian, the bodies of the Christians of Abellinum were laid to rest. Squat pillars, low vaults, and the distinct sensation of being a guest in someone else's home.
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Grotta di San Michele Arcangelo (Casalbore)
Casalbore (AV)
A cavity hollowed out of the living rock, a stage on the Via Sacra Langobardorum towards the Gargano: here Lombard pilgrims stopped to pray to the warrior Archangel, one thousand three hundred years ago.
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Santuario di Santa Maria dei Bossi
Casalbore (AV)
A country church in the middle of the woods, along the Pescasseroli-Candela drove road, built on top of a 2nd-century Roman funerary monument: faith resting on pagan bones.
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Ruderi del Convento dell'Incoronata
Sant'Angelo a Scala (AV)
A convent swallowed by the Partenio woods: what remains is the apse, the walls and the sound of the beech trees. No signs, no custodian.
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Grotta di San Guglielmo
Bagnoli Irpino (AV)
Here, they say, Guglielmo da Vercelli withdrew to pray before founding Montevergine and the Goleto: a cleft in the rock, and a man who spoke with God.
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Grotta di San Michele di Avella
Avella (AV)
Another Michaelic cave in the mountains of Avella: the cult of the Archangel, brought by the Lombards, clung to every cavern in Irpinia like ivy.
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Grotta-Eremo di San Michele Arcangelo (Sant'Angelo d'Alife)
Sant'Angelo d'Alife (CE)
Beneath the dead castle the mountain opens: a 60-metre gallery where the Lombards walled in an altar to the warrior Archangel. Darkness, dripping water, and a stone dome nobody expects down there.
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Chiesa rupestre e Grotta di San Michele di Curti
Gioia Sannitica (CE)
At 450 metres, under a natural arch draped in holm oaks, a Lombard rock shelter guards Byzantine frescoes that time had hidden under plaster. The altar is lit once a year, on 8 May.
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Chiesa dell'Ave Gratia Plena
Piedimonte Matese (CE)
A Gothic jewel wedged into the old town, with the Sanframondo chapel and its fifteenth-century frescoes. You step through an anonymous door and find yourself in the Quattrocento.
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Grotta dei Santi
Calvi Risorta (CE)
In the tufo (volcanic tuff) belly above the Rio dei Lanzi, sixty life-size saints have been staring at you out of the dark for a thousand years. A rock-cut chapel frescoed from the 10th to the 13th century, a stone's throw from ancient Cales.
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Grotta delle Fornelle
Calvi Risorta (CE)
It was a Roman cistern, then it became a church and a cemetery carved into the tufo (volcanic tuff): on the far wall a monumental Ascension keeps watch over tombs hollowed out of the rock.
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Abbazia di Santa Maria della Ferrara
Vairano Patenora (CE)
The first Cistercian abbey of the Kingdom of Naples lies dying among the fields: under the broken vaults survives the fresco of the burial of Malgerio Sorel, and beside it the face of the hermit pope Celestino V.
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Eremo di Monte Atano
Roccamonfina (CE)
On a volcanic cone covered in chestnut trees stand the walls of a hermitage and a mute little chapel: a place of prayer that the wood is slowly taking back.
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Convento di San Francesco a Casanova
Carinola (CE)
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.
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Grotta di San Michele di Profeti
Liberi (CE)
Beneath a limestone wall over five hundred metres high opens a cave with two mouths, consecrated to the Archangel who defeats the dragon. Twice a year the procession climbs up from Profeti and carries the saint back into the darkness of the mountain.
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Sacello di Santa Matrona
San Prisco (CE)
At the end of the right aisle of an ordinary parish church you look up and the ceiling bursts into a sky of gold and lapis lazuli: 5th-century mosaics with Christ and the symbols of the Evangelists, among the oldest in Campania. Almost nobody knows they are there.
- ◆ 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.
- Sacred art
Mausoleo Ossario dei 54 Martiri di Bellona
Bellona (CE)
On 7 October 1943 the Germans picked 54 men inside the church and shot them on the edge of a tufo (volcanic tuff) quarry twenty-five metres deep, then brought the earth down over the bodies with hand grenades. At the bottom of the quarry, since 1945, a monument carries their names.
- ◆ Sacred art
Chiesa di Santa Maria del Castagneto
Cusano Mutri (BN)
Founded at the end of the 7th century amid the chestnut groves, survivor of earthquakes and centuries of neglect: a rural church that seems to grow out of the wood, where silence is part of the furnishing.
- ◆ Sacred art
Grotta di San Simeone
Bucciano (BN)
A thirteen-metre cleft in the rock of the Taburno, lined with rock frescoes and a Byzantine-flavoured Christ enthroned. San Simeone, here, was invoked as the protector of fair weather.
- Sacred art
Chiesa dell'Annunziata e il Giudizio Universale
Sant'Agata de' Goti (BN)
Across the whole inner façade, an early fifteenth-century Last Judgement: Christ the judge welcomes with one hand and turns away with the other. It is painted on the west wall, so that the setting sun itself lights up the end of the world.
- ◆ Sacred art
Eremo rupestre di San Michele in Camposcuro
Frasso Telesino (BN)
A church wedged into the rock face, with frescoes from 1601 and two basins that still collect the rain as they did a thousand years ago. Every 8 May the statue of San Michele is carried up here in procession and stays all summer.
- ◆ Sacred art
Santuario di Santa Maria del Gualdo Mazzocca
Foiano di Val Fortore (BN)
In 1156 the pope authorised the hermit Giovanni da Tufara to build his monastery here, on top of a pagan temple, so they say. Earthquake in 1456, fire in 1630: what remains are ruins isolated in the woods and a chapel born out of the rubble.
- Sacred art
Santuario dell'Assunta e i Riti Settennali dei Battenti
Guardia Sanframondi (BN)
Every seven years the hooded men come out of the Rione Croce and beat their chests with sponges bristling with pins, until they bleed, before the Assunta. The last time was August 2024: the next is in 2031.