From Palermo’s railway station it is still quite a long walk to the small church of San Giovanni dei Lebbrosi. The route is very simple, but those who take it will not cross the most interesting parts of the city. Just follow the Corso dei Mille, named after the Thousand…
The seventeenth-century church of Santa Maria in Campitelli was specifically built to house an icon, the Madonna del Portico. This icon is famous for two reasons. Not only is it credited with having stopped a plague in the 1650s, it is also quite special because of the way it was…
The church of the Frisians has been the Dutch national church in Rome since 1989. Its official name is the church of Santi Michele e Magno. San Michele is of course Saint Michael the Archangel, who was credited with ending a terrible plague in Rome in 590. The archangel appeared…
I have procrastinated the gargantuan task of writing a post about the Santa Maria Maggiore for far too long. I have mentioned this major basilica several times now in other posts, and have visited it at least half a dozen times. The church is one of four major basilicas in…
The San Pietro in Vincoli is a church on the edge of the Esquiline Hill, just to the north of the famous Colosseum. It does not look much like a church. In fact, if you walk by, you would probably mistake it for some sort of early Renaissance palazzo. The…
In January 2017, I returned to the San Paolo fuori le Mura, one of the five papal basilicas in Rome.[1] I had previously visited the basilica in 2011 and was eager to see it again. The San Paolo is the third most important church in the city, preceded only by…