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Santa
Maria Regina Coeli
In a
city where most convents and monasteries have
long since been taken over by the state and
secularized into municipal buildings, schools
and even police stations,
Santa Maria
Regina Coeli ("Queen of Heaven) is
still a "working" convent.
The
church and convent are still in the hands of
the order of the Sisters of Charity, founded
by the Jeanne-Antide
Thouret (1765-1826), a benevolent
order that has survived the various waves of
state takeovers of religious orders in Italy
since the French Revolution. (Also see this entry on the
ex-monasteries of Naples.) The original order
was closed—as were all orders under French
revolutionary rule in Europe—but in 1811 King Murat arranged for
the Sisters of Charity to come to Naples and
be settled in
Santa Maria
Regina Coeli.
(The order started in France and is still
quite active, counting about 3,000 members
present at more than 350 sites in the world.)
The church, itself, is a very large hidden
treasure of the Neapolitan Baroque—"hidden" in
the sense that it is not in the "tourist
heart" of Naples, meaning the street known as
Spaccanapoli
or via dei
Tribunali, the two main east-west
streets (decumani)
of the old city. (See this
map.) The church and convent are up the
hill almost at the north-west corner of the
old city, on the third and little known decumanus.
Santa Maria Regina Coeli goes back to 1590
when an order of Augustinian nuns acquired the
premises and set about building their new
home. The original architect is cited in
sources as G. V. Della Monaca, but also as G.
F. di Palma. In any event, major renovation
was undertaken by F.A.
Picchiatti in the 1680s.
The entrance to the church (photo) consists of
a high double stairway leading up to a portico
and arcade with frescoes by anonymous Flemish
artists. The interior is a single nave with
side chapels. Internal decorations are from
the second half of the 1700s. There is
significant art work within the church,
including works by Stanzione,
Giordano, Gargiulo (aka
Micco Spadaro), Bardellino, Lorenzo Vaccaro,
and Filippo Vitale. The large adjacent convent
on the north is in the form given it in the
late 1600s by Picchiatti. The courtyard is
still well-kept and contains an 18th-century
pool with water-plants at the center. On the
end wall in the refectory is a significant
16th-century panel painting by an unknown
artist of the "Miracle of the Funeral from the
Sacred House of Maria a Loreto."
A musical sidelight in the long history of
Santa Maria Regina Coeli is the fact that the
great Neapolitan composer Domenico Cimarosa
was choir director from 1796 to 1800, at which
point he was arrested for his alleged
complicity in the republican
revolution of 1799. (He had written the
republican anthem.) At his trial he said he
was apolitical. He wrote that anthem because
they told him to, just as he had written royal
Bourbon anthems earlier. He was exiled.
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