Chiesa dei Santi Girolamo e Vitale

Scholars call it almost a Sacro Monte: four sacred spaces stacked and stitched together by stairs and corridors, built by Reggio Emilia's confraternity of San Girolamo around the Passion of Christ. Designed by Gaspare Vigarani, the Baroque complex holds a twenty-eight-step Scala Santa, a round triumphal church and a crypt reconstructing Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre.

Why it matters

The building began as the early Christian church of San Vitale, attested after 313; in 1443 the Confraternita di San Girolamo rescued the ruinous site and two years later the bishop consecrated the new church. In 1600 the confraternity's Ippolito Pratonieri returned from Jerusalem with the measurements of the Holy Sepulchre, and reproducing them became the complex's obsession. The present church, begun in 1646, grew into one of the most original Baroque ensembles in Emilia, still guarded by the same confraternity.

What to notice

The atrium holds three staircases, among them the twenty-eight-step Scala Santa, traditionally ascended on the knees on Good Friday. The Rotonda is the artistic summit: a circular plan with a central altar, a matroneo gallery and eight niches with statues of saints, composed as an image of the Resurrection. Below, the crypt keeps two chapels and the Sepulchre reconstruction built to Pratonieri's measurements. Later additions — Giuliano Melioli's eight-metre cocciopesto Last Supper, a life-size copy of the Shroud, an olive garden outside — make the Passion sequence tangible, and relics of eight martyrs rest here.

Context and history

Reggio architect and scenographer Gaspare Vigarani, who worked for Louis XIV's court, shaped the complex's theatrical character. Its design includes a light alignment in which a ray falls on a terracotta panel of Christ on the Cross and the statue of San Taddeo on the high altar. The ensemble was conceived as a sanctuary of the Passion.