Santa Maria della Sanità, Naples


The Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità is a basilica church located over the Catacombs of San Gaudioso, on a Piazza near where Via Sanità meets Via Teresa degli Scalzi, in the Rione of the Sanità, in Naples, Italy. The church is also called San Vincenzo or San Vincenzo della Sanità, due to the cult of an icon of San Vincenzo Ferrer, also called locally O' Monacone.
WWW santamariadellasanita.it

History

The church was originally attached to a Dominican monastery founded in 1577. The church was built in a centralized Greek-cross plan from 1602 to 1613 using the architectural designs of Giuseppe Nuvolo.
The main altar is elevated and accessed via flanking Baroque-style spiraling staircases, all sheathed in polychrome marble. The entrance to the crypt or catacombs is beneath the altar, which was elevated above the site of the original chapel at the site. On the left of the nave is an elevated polychrome marble pulpit, designed by Dionisi Lazzari.
The crypt, once site of a paleochristian chapel, was supposedly the burial site for San Gaudioso, a bishop of North Africa. The crypt has ten shallow altars surmounted by frescoes by Bernardino Fera.
The interior of the upper church and chapels are decorated by painters such as:
The original church was connected to the veneration of San Gaudioso, a bishop of Abitina in the Roman province of Africa, who died in Naples in c.451 after being set adrift from the north African coast by the Vandal King Genseric. In the 1500s, a 6th-century image of the Madonna and Child was uncovered here, and led to the establishment of this church.
The marble pulpit dates from 1677 to 1705. The organ, now in disuse, dates from the early 1700s.