What to See in Aversa: Attractions & Sights

More places of interest

Chiesa di San Bartolomeo

The church of San Bartolomeo is a small church in Aversa, on via Vittorio Emanuele III. It predates the eighteenth century and was built for devotion to Saint Bartholomew the Apostle; until the early twentieth century it was the seat of a confraternity of the same name. Today it is a subsidiary church of the parish of Santi Filippo e Giacomo and also hosts cultural events open to the town.
What to see
The façade, of the Roman school, is enlivened by relief motifs and side pilasters of the giant order; above the portal opens a large oval window. The interior has a single nave, with the bays separated by two pairs of twin pilasters with Corinthian capitals, along which runs a stucco frieze.
There are three eighteenth-century altars in polychrome marble, plus a fourth votive altar from the twentieth century. The floor is in eighteenth-century majolica of the Neapolitan school. On the high altar stands the statue of the Madonna delle Grazie, paid for by the faithful: it was brought into the church on 16 June 1853 and blessed on that occasion by the parish priest Farina.
Visiting
After the Irpinia earthquake of 1980 the church was closed to worship and reopened only in 1997, at the end of restoration and consolidation work. Opening and service times should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
The parish it belongs to, Santi Filippo e Giacomo on via Roma, has its seat in the sanctuary of Maria Regina della Famiglia, where every year, from mid-June to mid-October, the icon of the Madonna di Casaluce, patron saint of Aversa, returns.
Chiesa di Santa Maria a Piazza

The church of Santa Maria a Piazza, near the Aragonese castle, is considered the oldest church in Aversa: it dates from the eleventh century. It was built in Romanesque forms, but after an earthquake in the fourteenth century the building was entirely transformed according to Gothic principles. In the past it was a place where different peoples, Jews, Arabs, Byzantines and Lombards, met and traded goods. The offices of the bishop's curia are based at the church.
What to see
The façade is in exposed tuff, with three pointed portals. On the right, built into the structure, is the bell tower, which was never finished. Above the crossing rises the octagonal drum of the dome, against which lean, lower down, the two half-domes of the transept arms and that of the apse.
The interior has three naves. The thick pillars and round arches of the central nave are in exposed tuff, while the walls are plastered white; in some places you can see pillars that have encased older columns. The wooden truss roof is not original. Light comes in from the rose window in the façade and from the narrow pointed windows high up. Striking are the pendentives of the dome, in tuff, which stand out against the white of the vault; the same solution is repeated in the vaults of the transept and the apse. On the walls remain frescoes and fragments of the early school of Giotto and paintings up to the sixteenth century, including a Madonna and Child with Saints and a Trinity by Francesco Cicino.
Visiting
The church is in the old town, next to the Aragonese castle. Opening and service times should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
In the Middle Ages the church gave its name to one of the six districts into which Aversa was divided, Santa Maria a Piazza, alongside Santa Croce, San Girolamo, Sant'Antonio, Sant'Andrea and San Nicola.
Chiesa e Convento della Maddalena

The complex of the church and convent of the Maddalena in Aversa was founded by Charles I of Anjou in 1269, outside Porta San Nicola, as a hospice for lepers, later moved to the hospital of Sant'Eligio. In 1420 the convent passed to the Conventual Friars Minor, who stayed until 1813; then, under Joachim Murat, the building became the Casa dei folli of the Kingdom of Naples, the psychiatric hospital founded by the king.
What to see
Nothing remains of the Angevin foundation. From the Renaissance survive the grey stone cloister, built in 1430 by Jacopo Scaglione of Aversa and later enlarged by Friar Angelo Orabona, archbishop of Trani, who added the marble wellhead in the centre, with the family arms, and had the portico vaults frescoed, and the presbytery area of the church, with the tall hemispherical dome that recalls Brunelleschi's Florentine spaces.
The single-nave church holds the sarcophagus of Paolo Lamberto, a work by Giovanni da Nola commissioned by his brother Pirro in 1555, and opposite it that of Angelo Orabona, from 1575, with the family arms and a relief of the Magdalene. In the chapels are a canvas with Saints Lucy, Anthony and Aniello by Nicola Mercurio, from 1713, a wooden Crucifix on a tree trunk from the early fourteenth century and a Magdalene by Carlo Mercurio. In the transept are the Adoration of the Magi by Pietro Negroni and the high altarpiece, with the Madonna and Child above the model of a sixteenth-century Franciscan church and, in the niches, Saints Peter and Paul.
Visiting
According to the sources the complex is currently unsafe for use: before going, check whether the church is open.
Our editors' tip
Look at the portico of the façade: it holds a marble frieze that belonged to a fountain and was later adapted as a sarcophagus.
Museo diocesano

The Diocesan Museum of Aversa is a museum of sacred art housed in the city's cathedral, San Paolo. Established in 1995, it keeps the artistic and liturgical heritage of the cathedral. The route is divided into two parts: one in the cathedral's ambulatory, with architectural, sculptural and liturgical finds, and a second in the Loreto chapel and the Old Treasury.
What to see
The ambulatory itself is the church's greatest novelty: seven bays with ribbed cross vaults, according to the sources the only complete example of this type in Italy. Here is the eleventh-century marble slab with Saint George and the Dragon, one of the few pre-Romanesque sculptures in southern Italy: it was part of the jambs of the church's main portal, and according to another reading it would instead show Siegfried killing the dragon Fáfnir. A second relief shows, inside two garlands, two lions below and an elephant above.
Among the museum's works are seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church silver from major Neapolitan workshops, including that of the Guarriniello, several documents from the Norman period and the Madonna with the Banner, a canvas dated and signed by Francesco Solimena and considered an example of his painting. There are also some panels from the second half of the fifteenth century by Angiolillo Arcuccio, including the famous Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.
Visiting
The museum is inside Aversa cathedral. Opening hours and tickets should be checked on the diocese's website.
Our editors' tip
Arcuccio's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian contains a rare image of the cathedral in the fifteenth century, still Romanesque, with the dome topped by the basilisk, symbol of Aversa, and the old bell tower, demolished in 1492 and replaced by the present one.