Old woman tending plants in a picturesque Italian alley

Website created to tell the story of the Municipality of San Valentino

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C.I. SAN VALENTINO IN ABRUZZO CITERIORE

Largo San Nicola
+39 085 922343
info@majambiente.it

Historical Itineraries

Cathedral of Saints Valentine and Damian

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MAJELLA NATIONAL PARK

Via Badia 28, Sulmona
+39 0864 25701
info@parcomajella.it

Welcome to the Cathedral of Saints Valentine and Damian

Cathedral of Saints Valentine and Damian with historical architecture under a clear blue sky.

It stands on the site of a previous church. It is located in the highest part of the town, in the place where the bodies of Saints Valentine, bishop of Terracina, and his deacon Damiano (4th century), martyred and buried in the locality of Zappino, were transferred. A mention of an “Ecclesia Sancti Valentini” appears in 1324, in the Rationes decimarum. The beginning of the construction of the current Cathedral dates back to 1770, based on a design by engineers of the Royal House (Bourbon). The attribution to Luigi Vanvitelli has not been documented.

The current façade was built after the 1915 earthquake, commissioned by Monsignor Domenico Coia (1866-1954) to the architect Antonino Liberi (1855-1933), brother-in-law of Gabriele D’Annunzio, and constructed from 1916 to 1926. It features superimposed architectural orders: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, separated by protruding cornices. On the first level, there is a large triple-arched window with round arches, supported by slender Ionic columns, and then a large semicircular window.
The church’s layout is divided into three parts: nave, transept, and deep apse.
Also of particular interest is a ceramic Via Crucis, signed by Rinaldo Pardi (1898-1945) from Castelli.
At the center of the apse, placed in the choir loft, is the monumental organ by Tommaso Cefalo from the first half of the eighteenth century.

View of a town with the Cathedral of Saints Valentine and Damian against snowy mountains.

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