Naples Cathedral
— — the chapel that waits for the blood to turn.
Not only on a wall.
“The cathedral the city built around its patron. San Gennaro's relics rest in the Royal Chapel of the Treasure, and three times a year — in May, in September, on his December feast — a small phial of dried blood is brought out and watched until it liquefies. The nave above is wide and dim, with Gothic bones, Baroque skin, and a Romanesque crypt that goes back further than either. People come in from the street between errands, sit a while, and leave. The light comes mostly from the side chapels.
Naples Cathedral, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Naples Cathedral, the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta, sits on Via Duomo in the old centre of Naples, Campania. Construction began under Charles I of Anjou in the late thirteenth century and continued under his son Charles II, with the nave consecrated in 1314. The plan is Latin-cross Gothic, but the surfaces inside read mostly Baroque after centuries of rebuilding, including the work that followed the 1456 earthquake. The fabric absorbs three older churches, two of them paleo-Christian, and the Romanesque archbishop's crypt of San Gennaro runs beneath the apse.
Two side aisles open off the nave into family chapels carrying eight centuries of Neapolitan patronage. The Royal Chapel of the Treasure of Saint Januarius, finished in 1646, is the most decorated room in the building: forty-two columns of dark stone, frescoes by Domenichino and Lanfranco, and the silver reliquary bust commissioned in 1305 that holds the saint's skull. Beneath the high altar, the Carafa Crypt — late Renaissance, carved in 1497 by Tommaso Malvito — holds the bones in a small chamber of white marble. The Baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, fourth-century, carries the oldest mosaics in the Western church.
The cathedral is open most days from early morning to noon and again in the late afternoon, with the Treasure chapel and the archaeological excavations beneath the nave ticketed separately. The blood of San Gennaro is presented for veneration three times a year: the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, on 19 September, and on 16 December. The September presentation is the one the city watches most closely; a failure of the blood to liquefy is read as an omen, and the cathedral fills hours before the rite. The nearest Metro stop is Duomo on Line 1.