The Temple of St. Francis () is a Catholic place of worship in Gaeta, located in the historic center of the city. It belongs to the parish that includes the Cathedral of Saints Erasmus and Marcian and St. Mary of the Assumption. The frescoes in the temple were painted by Vincenzo Petrocelli and Domenico Morelli.
The church was built beginning in 1283, through donations from Charles II of Anjou, as a place of worship attached to a convent founded by Francis of Assisi in 1222; in the second half of the 1850s it was radically restored in neo-Gothic style to a design by Giacomo Guarinelli, through the involvement of Pope Pius IX and funding from Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies.
The building is located on the slope of Mount Orlando facing the Gulf of Gaeta, in a dominant position over the city's historic center; it is sometimes mistakenly referred to as the city cathedral because of its scenic location and elaborate architecture.
History In 1222, Francis of Assisi, traveling in southern Italy, preached in the town of Gaeta, where he stayed a few days at the invitation of the townspeople and performed a number of miracles. There he founded a small convent with an adjoining chapel, located outside the then city walls (the circuit of which had been enlarged the same year at the behest of Frederick II up to the present Piazza Conca); during the construction of which a carpenter, crushed by a beam, was killed. The saint, informed of the incident, drew a sign of the cross on the dead man, and he, called by name, resurrected. According to another source, the resurrected dead man was a bricklayer crushed by a boulder. The complex, once completed, consisted of the small church, devoid of any particular decoration, and the few cells of the friars, including the one in which the founder had slept;. the church was dedicated to the Virgin of the Assumption in 1255; the entire structure underwent initial restoration in 1275 at the behest of Charles I of Anjou.
With the growing number of vocations and because of the remarkable devotion shown by the people of Gaeta, at the same time as the expansion of the convent, the construction of a new and larger church began in 1285, dedicated to Francis of Assisi, who had been canonized in 1228 by Pope Gregory IX; the building was financed by Charles II of Anjou and his son Louis, a Franciscan and Bishop of Toulouse, who visited the site in 1295.
The church was finished in the early 14th century: Gothic in style, it was large in size, with a vast single nave of five bays covered with extradossed cross vaults, along which eight side chapels were asymmetrically arranged, ending with a quadrangular apse flanked, on the right, by an additional chapel and the bell tower crowned with a small dome; its external appearance is clearly visible in Frans Vervloet's painting View of Gaeta on the occasion of the blessing given by Pius IX on December 8, 1848 (1850). Over the centuries, it was enriched by Gaeta's most important noble families, who had their own aristocratic chapel inside it (among them the Gattola family, who had six burials there, the Guastaferri family, and the Gaetani family). Among the numerous funerary monuments was that of Cardinal Bartolomeo Uliari, from Padua, papal legate in Gaeta to Ladislaus I of Naples from 1393 to 1396, with a sarcophagus supported by two marble lions, later used as the base of the fountain in the center of the cloister of the convent. The church was home until 1806 to the Royal Mount of Piety of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, the existence of which is attested from 1697 and which had two chaplaincies in San Francesco. In 1742 the convent numbered 35 friars, of whom 20 were professed and 15 were lay brothers.
In 1809, with the suppression of religious orders ordered by Joachim Murat, king of Naples, the convent of St. Francis in Gaeta was also seized and used as a military hospital, and the complex fell into neglect, which continued after the restoration. The church, in particular, which had already been damaged by an earthquake in 1764 that caused the bell tower to collapse, was in a state of decay; this was noticed even by Pope Pius IX, in voluntary exile in Gaeta from November 1848 to September of the following year, who called for a restoration of the ancient structure. In this he urged Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, who implemented and financed the rebuilding of the church.
The project was entrusted to Giacomo Guarinelli, a major and commander of the Engineer Corps, as well as an architect. He did not demolish the old church, but preserved its Gothic structure by enlarging and cladding it, both internally and externally, with a rich neo-Gothic decorative scheme, and by making some changes to the spaces from their original state (e.g. by transforming the chapels into aisles). Work lasted from April 1850 to 1858; it was interrupted at the time of the siege of the city (1860), only to be finished under the direction of Francesco Del Vecchio (who took over from Guarinelli in 1870 and remained faithful to his predecessor's project) in 1874 at the expense of the Italian government, which had already financed a restoration in 1864 after the minor damage caused during the siege. However, the structure remained unfinished in the bell tower: it was intended to be built on the right side of the church, to be divided into four orders (construction stopped at the first) and to end with a tall spire, the top of which would have been placed about 62 meters from the base. The dedication, scheduled for October 4, 1885, did not take place until October 9, 1927.
The church was restored again in 1927 (on that occasion the upper part of the facade was deprived of the dense relief decoration formed by a series of quatrefoils) and entrusted to the Salesians of Don Bosco; in 1929 the Salesians founded, in the former convent, the "Don Bosco Oratory" and remained there until 1992. During World War II, on Sept. 8, 1943, a bomb hit the right choir loft of the church (but did not damage the rest of the building), and in the years 1951–1952 restoration work was necessary, which was followed by the reopening of the temple.
In the last years of the 20th century, the structure was subjected to several collapses, due to water infiltration and insufficient maintenance; therefore, it was closed in 1998 after part of the cross placed on the top of the facade fell off. Restoration work began in 2004 (the construction site was inaugurated on February 3 of that year in the presence of the then Archbishop of Gaeta Pier Luigi Mazzoni) and the church was reopened on October 4, 2008 with a Eucharistic celebration presided over by Archbishop Fabio Bernardo D'Onorio.
In October-November 2018, scenes from Michela Andreozzi's film Brave ragazze (2019) were filmed in the church and former convent.
Description
Measurements and dimensions
Parameter MeasureTotal length 72.5 metersLength of the nave 68 metersWidth of the nave 14.3 metersWidth of each side aisle 5.8 metersHeight of the facade 34.5 metersHeight (planned) of the completed bell tower 62 metersHeight of the vault of the nave 26.5 metersHeight of the vault of the side aisles 13.2 metersDiameter of the rose window of the facade 5.8 meters
Exterior
The exterior, much like the interior, is characterized by the rich nineteenth-century plastic decoration in neo-Gothic style, designed by Giacomo Guarinelli, which covers the ancient Gothic structure of the 13th-14th centuries.
The south façade is preceded by a monumental staircase that leads to the cemetery. In the central part, it is divided into two symmetrical flights, each of which follows a semicircular trajectory, forming a clearing in the center where, on a high pedestal, there is a statue of Religion by Luigi Persico (1853), depicted as a standing woman holding a large cross.
The elevation is prominent and traces the internal structure of three naves with as many sections separated by rectangular buttresses, each of which ends with a dome with an octagonal base. The lower part of the façade (corresponding to the internal distance between the floor and the key of the vaults of the aisles) is in travertine with decoration in pointed blind arches; the upper part, on the other hand, has a smooth wall surface in light-colored plaster, dating from the 1927 restoration (in fact, it was previously made up of a dense network of relief quatrefoils in stucco). Just above the cornice separating the two orders, close to each buttress, in a niche (and the two central ones are also covered by a high canopy), are four marble statues by different authors; from the left, they represent St. Bernard (by Tomaso d'Arnaud), St. Ambrose (by Tito Angelini), St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas (both by Tommaso Solari).
In the lower part, while each of the two lateral naves has a slender ogival single lancet window with wimperg, the central nave has a portal, also in travertine, with a deep spandrel richly decorated in bas-relief with floral motifs. It is surmounted by a high wimperg decorated with a high relief by Salvatore Irdi depicting the allegory of the Restoration of the Papacy and surmounted by a statue by Gennaro Calì depicting St. Francis of Assisi. On either side of the door, under a canopy, are marble statues of Charles II of Anjou (left) and Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, both by Gennaro De Crescenzo. Each of them rests on a high polygonal base with an inscription in Latin recalling the ruler's commitment to the Gaetan Church:
In axis with the portal, behind the statue of St. Francis, is a circular rose window about 5.8 meters in diameter, closed by a polychrome stained glass window with aniconic subject. At the top of the facade, above a pinnacle with an octagonal base, is an iron cross.
Along the right side of the church, overhanging the Angevin street below, stands, at the end of the side aisle, the squat bell tower with a square base and a brick wall face; this houses three bells, each inside an ogival single lancet window, surmounted by a blind marble rose window. The present construction is the first of the four orders that were to make up the tower designed by Giacomo Guarinelli, which was to end with a tall spire.
Interior
Inside, the temple of St. Francis presents a three-nave structure without a transept; they are covered with cross vaults and separated from each other by two rows of six pointed arches, resting on polystyle pillars. The walls, like the ceiling, are decorated with a dense stucco plastic apparatus of neo-Gothic style, dating from the 19th-century restoration (all that remains of the Gothic church is the structure, which is not visible).
The room is presented as remarkably bright due to the light color of the wall face (cream-colored, with light amber decorative and structural elements) and the numerous windows: these are closed with polychrome geometric stained-glass windows and are, with the exception of the four rose windows, all single-light ogival windows, the ones forming the clerestory of the nave being wide and not very slender, while those of the smaller naves are narrow and high. The bichromatic floor, made of marble from Mount Orlando, is decorated along the nave with several inlaid rose windows that recall the neo-Gothic decorations on the walls.
Abutting the pillars dividing the three arches are twelve travertine statues depicting the Apostles. Each rests on a richly decorated marble shelf and is surmounted by a hanging canopy adorned with small spires. The sculptures were made by the brothers Giuseppe and Antonio d'Annibale.