The story
Three times a year, on the Saturday before the first Sunday of May, on 19 September and on 16 December, crowds fill Naples Cathedral to watch the archbishop hold up a glass ampoule said to contain the dried blood of San Gennaro, the city's patron saint, and wait for it to turn liquid. The relic is kept in the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro, which the city vowed to build during the plague of 1527 and which was built and decorated in the 17th century. Its frescoes are by Domenichino, the painter from Bologna, and one altarpiece by Jusepe de Ribera, the Spaniard who worked in Naples, shows the saint walking unharmed out of a furnace.
The cathedral is primarily a working church, the seat of the archbishop, but it holds many centuries of art under one roof. The Gothic church was raised by the Angevin kings around 1300 over older basilicas, and off its left aisle the early Christian church of Santa Restituta survives, with the baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte and its mosaics from around 400. The neo-Gothic front seen from Via Duomo is much later, completed in 1905.
Beneath the high altar lies the Succorpo, a marble Renaissance crypt built for Cardinal Oliviero Carafa to hold the saint's remains. The same cardinal ordered from Pietro Perugino, the Umbrian master who taught Raphael, a large panel of the Assumption of the Virgin with the apostles around the empty tomb, dated 1506. Scholars still debate how much of it his workshop painted. It now hangs in the Seripandi chapel, and the kneeling figure in it has been identified as Carafa himself.
