Description
The Basilica of San Paolo Maggiore is a large Baroque church in Piazza San Gaetano, in the ancient center of Naples. You spot it right away: on its facade it still has two Corinthian columns from the Roman temple it was built on.
The columns of the Temple of the Dioscuri, from the first century AD, are about eleven meters tall and still hold up their architrave. Beside them, in two niches, stand the statues of Saints Peter and Paul. A double staircase leads to the entrance.
Inside is a Latin-cross church with three aisles. The floor and the nave's cladding are made from the marbles of the collapsed temple, reworked by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro from 1712. On the ceiling remain the frescoes by Massimo Stanzione that survived the bombs of 1943.
Don't miss Solimena's sacristy, behind the apse: seventeenth-century furnishings and walls covered with angels, allegories and virtues, with the Fall of Saint Paul and the Fall of Simon Magus, all signed by the painter.
Also worth seeing are the Firrao Chapel, to the left of the apse, lined with polychrome marbles and still in its original look, and Vaccaro's statue of the Guardian Angel in the nave. Under the staircase you can go down to the remains of the temple, rediscovered in 1962.
The temple front, six columns and a sculpted pediment, had stayed standing for sixteen centuries. In 1671 Dionisio Lazzari joined it to the church with a masonry vault and, probably, weighed it down too much: in 1688 an earthquake brought it down.
The first church here, behind the temple, was born between the eighth and ninth centuries to celebrate a victory of the Neapolitans over the Saracens. In 1538 it passed to Gaetano Thiene and his Theatines, who rebuilt it on a grand scale.
In the chapel to the right of the apse, in a case of gilded brass, rests Saint Andrew Avellino, who died here in 1608. In 1585, during the riots that followed the lynching of the popular leader Starace, he had acted as a mediator and opened his order's resources to the poor.
The columns of the Temple of the Dioscuri, from the first century AD, are about eleven meters tall and still hold up their architrave. Beside them, in two niches, stand the statues of Saints Peter and Paul. A double staircase leads to the entrance.
Inside is a Latin-cross church with three aisles. The floor and the nave's cladding are made from the marbles of the collapsed temple, reworked by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro from 1712. On the ceiling remain the frescoes by Massimo Stanzione that survived the bombs of 1943.
Don't miss Solimena's sacristy, behind the apse: seventeenth-century furnishings and walls covered with angels, allegories and virtues, with the Fall of Saint Paul and the Fall of Simon Magus, all signed by the painter.
Also worth seeing are the Firrao Chapel, to the left of the apse, lined with polychrome marbles and still in its original look, and Vaccaro's statue of the Guardian Angel in the nave. Under the staircase you can go down to the remains of the temple, rediscovered in 1962.
The temple front, six columns and a sculpted pediment, had stayed standing for sixteen centuries. In 1671 Dionisio Lazzari joined it to the church with a masonry vault and, probably, weighed it down too much: in 1688 an earthquake brought it down.
The first church here, behind the temple, was born between the eighth and ninth centuries to celebrate a victory of the Neapolitans over the Saracens. In 1538 it passed to Gaetano Thiene and his Theatines, who rebuilt it on a grand scale.
In the chapel to the right of the apse, in a case of gilded brass, rests Saint Andrew Avellino, who died here in 1608. In 1585, during the riots that followed the lynching of the popular leader Starace, he had acted as a mediator and opened his order's resources to the poor.