entry June 2010
Santa
Maria Regina
Coeli
In a city where
most convents and monasteries have long since
been taken over by the state and secularized
into municipal buildings, schools and even
police stations, Santa Maria Regina Coeli
("Queen of Heaven) is still a "working" convent.
The church and convent
are still in the hands of the order of the Sisters of
Charity, founded by the Jeanne-Antide Thouret (1765-1826), a
benevolent order that has survived the various waves of
state takeovers of religious orders in Italy since the
French Revolution. (Also see this
entry on the ex-monasteries of Naples.) The
original order was closed (as were all orders under
French revolutionary rule in Europe) but in 1811 King Murat arranged for the
Sisters of Charity to come to Naples and be settled in
Santa Maria Regina Coeli. (The order started in France and is
still quite active, counting about 3,000 members
present at more than 350 sites in the world.)
The church, itself, is a
very large hidden treasure of the Neapolitan
Baroque —"hidden" in the sense that it is not in
the "tourist heart" of Naples, meaning the
street known as Spaccanapoli or via dei Tribunali,
the two main east-west streets (decumani)
of the old city. (See this
map.) The church and convent are up the
hill almost at the north-west corner of the old
city, on the third and little known decumanus.
Santa Maria Regina Coeli goes back to 1590 when
an order of Augustinian nuns acquired the
premises and set about building their new home.
The original architect is cited in sources as G.
V. Della Monaca, but also as G. F. di Palma. In
any event, major renovation was undertaken by F.A. Picchiatti in
the 1680s.
The entrance to the church
(photo) consists of a high double stairway
leading up to a portico and arcade with frescoes
by anonymous Flemish artists. The interior is a
single nave with side chapels. Internal
decorations are from the second half of the
1700s. There is significant art work within the
church, including works by Stanzione, Giordano, Gargiulo (aka
Micco Spadaro), Ragolia,
Bardellino, Lorenzo Vaccaro, and Filippo Vitale.
The large adjacent convent on the north is in
the form given it in the late 1600s by
Picchiatti. The courtyard is still well-kept and
contains an 18th-century pool with water-plants
at the center. On the end wall in the refectory
is a significant 16th-century panel painting by
an unknown artist of the "Miracle of the Funeral
from the Sacred House of Maria a Loreto."
A musical sidelight in the long history
of Santa Maria Regina Coeli is the fact that the
great Neapolitan composer Domenico Cimarosa was
choir director from 1796 to 1800, at which point
he was arrested for his alleged complicity in
the republican
revolution of 1799. (He had written the
republican anthem.) At his trial he said he was
apolitical. He wrote that anthem because they
told him to, just as he had written royal
Bourbon anthems earlier. He was exiled.
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