The story
On 21 March 2024 the church of the Girolamini, in the old centre of Naples, opened again after ten years of building and restoration work, and more than 1,200 people came in on the first day. It was begun in 1592 by the priests of the Oratory, the community founded by Saint Philip Neri, to designs by the Florentine architect Giovanni Antonio Dosio. The Neapolitan name comes from San Girolamo della Carità, the order's first church in Rome.
The Girolamini is a church before it is a museum, so its paintings are seen in the chapels and on the walls of the nave. Over the main door, on the inside wall, Luca Giordano, the famously quick Neapolitan painter, frescoed Christ driving the money changers from the Temple. In the first chapel on the right hangs the Death of Saint Alexius by Pietro da Cortona, painted in Rome around 1638 for Anna Colonna, wife of a nephew of Pope Urban VIII, and given to the Oratorian fathers. It shows the dying saint holding the letter by which his family at last recognized him.
From the church, the larger of the two cloisters leads on to the fathers' picture gallery and to their library.
