Chiesa di Santa Sofia
Benevento (BN)
FamousSacred art
The story
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.
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- History & archaeology
Teatro Romano e il Triggio
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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.
Sacred artHortus Conclusus
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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.
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.
- History & archaeology
ARCOS — Museo d'arte contemporanea Sannio
Benevento (BN)
Beneath vaults of tufo (volcanic tuff), in the underground spaces of a former air-raid shelter, the contemporary art of the Sannio dialogues with the Egyptian treasures of the temple of Isis.
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.