Chiesa di Santa Maria della Verita'
Benevento (BN)
Hidden gemSacred art
The story
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.
Access
FREE, irregular worship hours
More gems in Benevento
- History & archaeology
Teatro Romano e il Triggio
Benevento
The great Hadrianic theatre opens up all at once among the alleys of the Triggio, the oldest quarter, where Roman stone and medieval houses blur into one another.
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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.
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On the ancient Via Appia the stone arches stride across the river Sabato: the same threshold that travellers bound for Rome once crossed to enter Benevento.
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Golden marble carved dense with reliefs, the arch that celebrated Trajan still marks the entrance to the road that led toward Brindisi and the East.
Sacred artChiesa di Santa Sofia
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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.
History & archaeologyMuseo del Sannio
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The medieval cloister of Santa Sofia, a UNESCO site, with its forty-seven columns that weave together real and fantastic figures, holds the layered memory of the Sannio.
More gems: Sacred art
Sacred artCappella Sansevero (Cristo Velato)
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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.