Santuario di Montevergine
Mercogliano
FamousSacred art
The story
Clinging to the Partenio, the sanctuary guards the dark Madonna the pilgrims call Mamma Schiavona; you climb by funicular, through beech woods and mist, to look out over the whole of Irpinia.
Access
FREE, funicular €
More gems in Mercogliano
- Villages
Capocastello di Mercogliano
Mercogliano (AV)
The medieval borgo (old village) below the castle, largely abandoned after the earthquakes: arches, stairs that lead to no door any more, and overhead the shadow of Montevergine.
- Museums
Palazzo Abbaziale di Loreto
Mercogliano (AV)
A palace by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro guarding 200,000 volumes, codices and incunabula, and an eighteenth-century pharmacy with its jars still in place, as if the apothecary monk had just stepped out.
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.