Two dates explain the church of the Rosary in Moliterno. The original structure goes back to 1510; in 1616 the Dominicans took the building in hand and enlarged it, giving it the three naves it still has. Little more than a century separates the early sixteenth-century shell from the church the town uses today, and the seventeenth-century campaign is the one that won: the interior is governed by its scale, not by that of the older core.
What to see
The vaults are the main reason to step inside. They are carefully frescoed, and the painting runs right across them, so once through the door it pays to look up before looking ahead. It was the enlargement of 1616 that made them possible, because it was with the three naves that the church gained the bays the painters could work on.
The other thing to look for are the wooden altars, carved and finely made. They belong to the same Dominican endowment as the frescoes: furnishing rather than architecture, but the part that best repays a close look, one altar at a time.
Visiting
This is not one of the district's country churches: it stands in the town itself, listed among the parish churches alongside the mother church of Santa Maria Assunta. Inside, take it in the order in which the building grew - first the three-nave plan, which sets the scale of everything, then the painted vaults above it, and last the wooden altars.
Our editors' tip
Line this visit up with the mother church of Santa Maria Assunta, which keeps a sixteenth-century panel of Saint Peter by Simone da Firenze and a seventeenth-century Last Supper by Giovan Francesco Ferro. Seen one after the other, the two churches tell the same century by different means: carved wood in one, paint in the other.