The church of Santa Maria a Ricorboli is not mentioned in any travel guide. There was a considerable chance that I would never have visited it, had it not been discussed on the best website about churches in Florence, the unrivalled The Churches of Florence. The article there mentioned a…
We could certainly count ourselves lucky. We happened to visit the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia on the first Sunday of the month, and it turned out that the museum could be visited for free on that day. Since 1878, the Galleria Nazionale is housed in the Palazzo dei Priori,…
People standing in front of the church of Sant’Anastasia will probably not realise that this is one of the oldest churches in the city. The history of the church possibly goes back to the first quarter of the fourth century, when Christianity had just become an allowed religion (religio licita)…
Saint Peter’s Basilica is the largest Christian church in the world. Although it is not the cathedral of Rome, it is arguably more famous than the church that does have the honour of the being the cathedral: the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. Together with the San Giovanni, the…
“Of all the Roman monuments at the end of the thirteenth century, the most Roman was, paradoxically, the double basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, the mother church of the new order of Franciscan friars”.[1] I can only agree with this assessment by Giotto expert Francesca Flores d’Arcais. The Basilica…
This is part 8 of my report about my walk along the Via Appia, from the Circus Maximus to the Villa of the Quintilii some 8 kilometres further to the southeast. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 can be found here. After leaving the Complesso di Capo…
The Santissimo Nome di Gesù all’Argentina – simply called Il Gesù by just about anyone – is the mother church of the Jesuit Order. Although founded in 1534 and approved six years later, the Order did not provide the Catholic Church with a pope until 2013, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio…
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…