Chiesa di San Francesco di Paola

Off Corso Due Mari in the Borgo, the Church of San Francesco di Paola carries the memory of open countryside into the modern city. Consecrated in 1623 on a rural chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie, it keeps an elliptical narthex unique in Taranto, a baroque altar of 1676 and a long watch over Holy Week.

Why it matters

The Minim friars of San Francesco di Paola reached Taranto in 1530, called by Archbishop Antonio Sanseverino, and settled first at a country chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie outside the built town. Nearly a century later, in 1623, the prelate and knight of Malta Ludovico Montefuscoli consecrated the church that grew on that ground, funded in part by the city's seafaring community, whose voyages the saint, protector of seafarers, was invoked to guard.

When the Umbertine quarter swallowed the fields, the church found itself at the centre of the new city, and the archdiocese erected the parish of San Francesco di Paola in 1918 around it. Its endurance — through the 1743 earthquake, through the suppression of religious orders, through the Borgo's construction — makes it the oldest monastic foundation of the quarter and a rare thread of continuity across the city's transformation.

What to notice

The entrance is the curiosity: before the facade stands an elliptical narthex, a curved vestibule closed by heavy gates, a plan device that has no real parallel among the city's churches and gives the threshold the feel of a small theatre foyer. Step through and the interior opens as a Latin cross with three naves, its chapels holding furnishings gathered across the centuries.

Seek out the chapel of San Giovanni Gualberto with its baroque altar of 1676, the quiet chapel of San Giuseppe, and the stone statue of the Madonna delle Grazie, likely sixteenth- or seventeenth-century work that preserves the country cult of the original chapel. Look up at the crossing, where Vincenzo Galoppi's dome fresco of 1920 shows the Glory of San Francesco di Paola; the Neapolitan painter signed it barely a generation before the facade took its present form in the 1956 restoration.

Context and history

The foundation story spans three centuries: friars arriving in 1530, a church consecrated in 1623, damage from the great earthquake of 1743 answered by repeated remodelling. The community was dispersed under the Napoleonic suppressions and again after 1865, recovering its house only in 1893, when the friars returned — five years before the parish was formally erected by Archbishop Oronzo Mazzella on 24 November 1918.

The twentieth century polished the church into its current form: the sober but monumental facade of the 1956 restoration, the 1920 dome fresco, and a fixed place in the city's greatest rite. During Holy Week, the Church of San Francesco di Paola is associated with the Processione dei Misteri, an important tradition in Taranto's religious life.