The basilica of Santa Maria a Pugliano, in the square of the same name, is the mother church of Ercolano and the oldest in the town and in the whole Vesuvian area. Already in the eleventh century the Pugliano hill, whose name probably comes from a praedium pollianum, an estate that belonged to one Pollio, had an oratory dedicated to the Virgin: in 1076 a Neapolitan noblewoman left it a bequest in her will.
What to see
The oldest evidence is the slabs of two pagan marble sarcophagi of the second and fourth centuries AD, adapted as a Christian altar probably in the eleventh century: an inscription mentions one John, son of Guaimar V of Salerno, abbot in 1097 of the Neapolitan monastery of San Sebastiano, on which the church depended. On the high altar is venerated the wooden statue of the Madonna delle Grazie, or Madonna di Pugliano, of the fourteenth century, in the French taste; the Black Crucifix dates from the same period. In the sixteenth century the church reached the height of its fame: from 1574 it is called a pontifical basilica, in 1576 it became the parish of a territory stretching from Torre del Greco to San Giovanni a Teduccio, and with the bull of 13 June 1579 Pope Gregory XIII confirmed the indulgences for those who visited it on the first Friday of March, at Easter and on the Assumption. In that century the two majolica domes and the bell tower were built.
During the eruption of 1631 the lava divided just above the hill and the church was spared; later via Pugliano was laid out on the solidified lava, and the basilica was turned round with a new façade beside the bell tower, with a four-arched portico. The interior, late Baroque and altered until 1935, is a Latin cross with three naves and an asymmetrical transept. It holds two holy-water stoups made from Roman basins in 1584, the font of 1425, one of the oldest outside Naples, the high altar of the late sixteenth century, a seventeenth-century wooden bust of Saint Januarius and the walnut pulpit of 1685, contemporary with the choir and the sacristy cupboard. The square bell tower, more than thirty-six metres high, has four levels and three bells: the largest weighs four tonnes and was cast thanks to eleven hundred pounds of gold donated by Ferdinand II.
Visiting
The basilica is in piazza Pugliano. The patronal feast of the Madonna di Pugliano is on 15 August. Opening hours should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
On the side of the church facing via Trentola was the Terra Santa, the first cemetery of Resina, used until 1906: one of the last Italian cemeteries still in use inside a built-up area. From that side you can also see a sixteenth-century marble portal, now walled up, perhaps the old main entrance when the church faced another way.
