Chiesa di Cristo Re

Between the public gardens and the road to Collemaggio stands what is accounted L'Aquila's first modern church: designed in 1933 by a superintendent of monuments, home to a four-metre bronze Christ the King once destined for the summit of Corno Grande, and carefully recovered after the earthquake of 2009.

Why it matters

Most of L'Aquila's churches answer to the thirteenth century; this one belongs to the era when the city styled itself "the Great L'Aquila", filling its new avenues with Liberty villas and public buildings. The project dates to 1933 and its author is Alberto Riccoboni, an architect from Giulianova who was then serving as superintendent of monuments for Abruzzo and Molise — a rare case of the monuments' own guardian designing a new church. He began with a neo-Romanesque scheme and then moved decisively towards rationalism, making this the city's first experiment in modern construction techniques and materials as well as forms.

Consecrated in 1935, the church gave the quartiere of San Giorgio its parish focus along Viale Francesco Crispi, near the Villa comunale gardens and aligned with the vista towards Collemaggio; the quarter's regime-era buildings around it, including the former Casa della Giovane Italiana that now houses the Gran Sasso Science Institute, share its deliberate modernity.

What to notice

The facade quotes Renaissance architecture. Riccoboni borrowed the Renaissance theme of the Basilica of San Bernardino: a wall articulated in three horizontal orders and three vertical sections, with a band over the lunetted portal beneath a gabled porch. The design echoes the sixteenth-century facade of San Bernardino, while omitting its marble ornament.

Inside, the focus is the apse, where a bronze statue of Christ the King about four metres tall rises against a cross of travertine and alabaster. Mussolini commissioned it from the sculptor Ulderico Conti for 30,000 lire and donated it to the city; the original plan to erect it on the summit of Corno Grande, the highest peak of the Gran Sasso, came to nothing, and the statue was installed here instead. The pairing of a fascist-era commission with a devotional image inside a parish church makes this apse one of the most historically loaded interiors in the city.

Context and history

The parish began as a succursale of the nearby Santi Giusta e Marco and became autonomous in 1974. The 2009 earthquake damaged the building; restoration began in November of that year, and the church reopened in 2013–2014.