Sacello di Santa Matrona
San Prisco (CE)
Hidden gemSacred art
The story
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.
Access
FREE, but irregular opening (often only around Mass times)
More gems in San Prisco
History & archaeologyMausoleo delle Carceri Vecchie
San Prisco (CE)
For centuries the peasants swore that here, inside this brick drum on the Appia, the gladiators waited in chains for their turn in the arena. It was in fact an imperial tomb of the 1st century, and above the ancient entrance somebody built a chapel.
- Hiking
Monte Tifata e i ruderi del santuario di Diana
San Prisco (CE)
The mountain sacred to Diana Tifatina, where the holm oaks of the sacred wood gave the mountain its name: you climb among ruins that the shepherds still call the temple of Jupiter, and from the summit cross the Capuan plain opens all the way to the sea.
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.