Mausoleo Ossario dei 54 Martiri di Bellona
Bellona (CE)
KnownSacred art
The story
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.
Access
FREE, open air. Commemoration on 7 October
More gems in Bellona
- In the water & diving
Ponte di Annibale e terme di Triflisco
Bellona (CE)
Here the Volturno narrows between the rocks, and memory says that Hannibal threw a bridge across to move his army over, the same army that loosed a herd of oxen with blazing horns against the Romans. Of the bridge only a few teeth of stone remain in the green water.
- History & archaeology
Cammarelle delle Fate (criptoportico romano)
Bellona (CE)
Twenty-two interconnected cisterns dug at the foot of the hill: the people, who could no longer read the stones, swore they were the chambers of the fairies. They were instead the belly of a Roman villa of the 2nd century BC.
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.