Concattedrale di San Michele Arcangelo

Sarno's cathedral has a mannerist facade and a Baroque interior with a single aisle of side chapels beneath a coffered ceiling of twenty-one canvases depicting apparitions of the Archangel. The church has served the city since the Middle Ages.

Why it matters

Sarno's cathedral carries a double dignity: principal church of the city since the Middle Ages and, since the union of the dioceses of Nocera dei Pagani and Sarno on 30 September 1986, concathedral of the present diocese of Nocera Inferiore-Sarno. The building records a complete Counter-Reformation rebuilding commissioned from 1627 by the Spanish-born bishop Stefano Sole Castelblanco, and its ceiling is a rare survival of a full figurative programme on wood: twenty-one paintings of the Archangel's apparitions in the Old and New Testament, three by Angelo and Francesco Solimena and eighteen by Carlo Turri di Gravina, installed in the late seventeenth century under Bishop Nicola Antonio de Tura. The ceiling links the church to the work of the Solimena circle beyond Naples.

What to notice

The western facade has a two-register Counter-Reformation scheme in white plaster with grey Ionic pilasters, its inscription naming the patron and the date of reconstruction, crowned by a niche statue of Michael the Archangel with the square-plan bell tower, its cell octagonal, standing slightly forward at the right. Inside, the space is a single aisle flanked by eight side chapels beneath a barrel vault that opens into the coffered ceiling. The canvases form a narrative band of the Archangel's apparitions across the books of the Bible, echoing the frescoes of the presbytery vault. At the end of the right-hand run, the chapel of the Santissimo Sacramento preserves a Baroque Last Supper painted by Angelo Solimena. The sacristy keeps the late-sixteenth-century inlaid walnut furniture made when the choir was rebuilt, and its vault was frescoed in the eighteenth century.

Context and history

During a pastoral visit in 1581, Bishop Fusco described a Gothic church of three naves with three eastern portals, a portico and a nearby bishop's palace — the complex that gave the quarter its name, Episcopio. In the late sixteenth century the choir was rebuilt and the sacristy enlarged, acquiring the walnut furniture still kept there. From 1627 the complete rebuilding reversed the orientation, turning the facade west and compressing the medieval three-nave body into the single-aisle hall visible today. The twenty-one ceiling canvases were installed in the final years of the seventeenth century; during the following century, further works accumulated in the chapels. The building was re-ordered liturgically in 1958–62 after the Second Vatican Council, braced after the Irpinia earthquake of 1980, and repaired after the landslide flood of 5 May 1998, which struck this part of Sarno hard.