Chiesa dell'Ave Gratia Plena
Piedimonte Matese (CE)
KnownSacred art
The story
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.
Access
FREE, opening tied to religious services
More gems in Piedimonte Matese
- History & archaeology
Parco Archeologico di Monte Cila
Piedimonte Matese (CE)
Five semicircles of megalithic walls, seven kilometres in all, raised in the 7th century BC and then forgotten in the myrtle scrub. From up there the Samnites watched the same plain you are watching.
MuseumsMUCIRAMA — Museo Civico Raffaele Marrocco
Piedimonte Matese (CE)
In the former convent of San Tommaso d'Aquino sleep the Runner and the Zeus of Cila: Samnite bronzes pulled out of the mountain just above. A free museum nobody expects in a mountain town.
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.