©
Jeff Matthews entry May 2009
The Church of Sant’Agostino della Zecca
I don’t think
there is a large historic church in Naples that is
in such dreadful condition as that of Sant’Agostino della
Zecca (also “alla Zecca” and
known originally, in the late 1200s, as Sant’Agostino
Maggiore). It has been closed since the
1980 earthquake. In spite of grand commitments
from various political quarters to restore the
church, nothing has been done nor does that even
look remotely likely.
“Zecca” in the name means “mint” in Italian; the
church is so called because it was right across
the street from the building that for many
centuries cranked out the coin of the realm for
the kingdom of Naples. (That building, itself, is
very historic and is said to have been the
property of the medieval poet and secretary to
Frederick II, Pier della Vigna, well-known from
his presence in Dante’s Inferno [Canto XIII] as
one of the pitiful victims of suicide. The old
mint building has been restored and serves as the
Naples conservatoria
—not conservatorio
as in music school, but conservatoria, the real estate hall of
records for the province of Naples.)
In
photo, below, the large rectangular building
left of center is the old mint.
To the right, the oddly shorn-off building is
the old monastery that belonged to the
church (the prominent white dome), above it. The
straight street angling up from
bottom center to the right is Corso Umberto, on
its way to the train station.
The
church represented the first presence in
Naples of the Augustinian religious order; the
property was given to the Augustinians by Robert I
of Anjou in 1259, a time when that dynasty had not
even fully secured its grip on the kingdom and was
still struggling against the descendants of Frederick II of
Hohenstaufen. It was the first of the three
early Angevin additions to the city of Naples, the
other two being the construction of a hospital at
the church of S. Eligio
and the building of the church of S. Maria del Carmine.
(This was even before they got around to the Maschio Angioino, the
Angevin Fortress down at the port.) The new church
of Sant’Agostino was built next to an earlier
Basilian monastery with its even older “Ademaria”
tower (still standing). (The “Ademaria” spelling
is apparently correct and is so cited in many
sources without an explanation of the etymolgy. If
you are betting that it is simply a miscopied
version of “Avemaria”
—maybe, but that level of erudition is above
my pay-grade. It was also called the “Tower of
Paleopoli,” (Old City) a reference to the original
pre-Naples settlement of Parthenope,
but I don’t know why.) The Augustians appropriated
the monastery when they built the church next
door.
The sorry condition of the
church is no doubt due to its location. It is not
far from the main train station and was smack in
the middle of the area gutted during the risanamento, the massive
urban renewal of Naples in the late 1800s. To lay
the new straight road
(Corso Umberto) to the railway station the city builders
simply sheared through hundreds of buildings,
truncating at least a few major churches (as in
the above photo). San Pietro
ad Aram was one and Sant’Agostino was
another; in both cases, the rest of the
church/monasteries were left standing and
continued to function in their truncated form. An
aerial view (above) of the Sant’Agostino monastery
shows it sawed off at an oblique angle with the
slanted side now fronting on the main street. The
main body of the church was not destroyed.
The 1780 date
over the entrance marks the Bourbon
restoration of the church. The skull (memento mori)
display is typically found on many
churches in Naples.
(See above link.)
In its
very long history, the church/monastery was
the site of the Augustinian university (1287); it
was also severely damaged by an earthquake in
1456. It went through partial restoration in the
late 1600s under the direction of the prominent
architect, Bartolomeo
Picchiati, and further restoration was
completed by the Bourbons in 1780. The Augustinian
monastic order was suspended (as were almost all
others in Italy) after the unification of Italy in
1861; the risanamento
was shortly thereafter, and since that time the
church has fallen on hard times although my
understanding is that it was actually used until
the earthquake of 1980. It has now been
closed since then, and I know of no exact
catalogue of works of art in the church. Some have
been moved to storage, some have been stolen, and
some are probably still there. In any event, a
list of the works that at least used to be on
the premises include the magnificent statue of Saint Augustine
Trampling Heresy by Giuseppe Sanmartino,
one of the greatest of all Neapolitan sculptors
and creator of the renowned Veiled Christ
(on display in the Sansevero chapel in Naples);
also, there are (or were) a number of paintings by
Evangelista Schiano and Giacinto Diano, both noted
Neapolitan artists from the mid-1700s.
sources:
—Napoli
Sacra, Guida alle Chiese della Città, vol. 1.
Sopraintendenza per i beni artistici e storici,
pub. Elio de Rosa, Naples 1993.
—Napoli
antica by Vincenzo Regina, pub. Newton
Compton, Rome. 1994.
—S. Maria la Nova a
Napoli, Fondazione e trasformazioni del
complesso conventuale (secili XIII-XX) by Andrea Di Dena. Doctoral thesis,
Frederick II University of Naples, Dept. of
Architecture. 2005.
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