The church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, called by the faithful the church of the Carmine because of the devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, is a church in Pozzuoli introduced by the Carmelite friars, whose devotion has remained very much alive even after their departure from Pozzuoli in 1807.
What to see
The façade is in Renaissance style and dates from the first half of the nineteenth century; above the marble portal a medallion bears the dedication DEIPARAE CONSOLATRICI SACRUM. The interior is on a sixteenth-century plan, with side chapels and a hint of a transept: the nave is covered by a barrel vault with lunettes, the central part of the transept by a lantern tower. On the left the chapel of Saint Lucy has a marble balustrade of 1747 and a polychrome marble altar of 1738 with the saint's image in inlay; the altar of the Madonna del Parto was erected in 1750 by the Pozzuoli nobleman Andrea Di Fraia, and the columns and pediment with the Bourbon coat of arms were added in 1846 by Ludovico di Borbone, Count of Aquila. On the right are the chapel of the Madonna del Carmine, with a polychrome marble altar and an eighteenth-century statue of the Madonna, and the Baroque altar of San Carlo Borromeo, of 1818, with a nineteenth-century canvas and the tomb of Bishop Carlo Rosini at its foot.
The church was built between the end of the fifteenth and the start of the sixteenth century by the Carmelite friars of the church of the Carmine Maggiore in Naples and was dedicated to Saint James the Greater; it was rebuilt in the first half of the seventeenth century and restored in the second half of the eighteenth, and between 1810 and 1817 it was embellished and dedicated to Our Lady of Consolation. Another image of the Virgin was also venerated there, before which King Ferdinand II of Bourbon prayed with his pregnant wife, Queen Maria Teresa, asking the Madonna to help her through the pregnancy: from then on the statue was called the Madonna del Parto and pregnant women of Pozzuoli went there to ask for the grace of a good childbirth. The church was raised to a parish church on 11 April 1943.
Visiting
The church is in Pozzuoli. The sources consulted give no opening hours or times of services: these should be checked.
Our editors' tip
The sixteenth-century wooden statues of the Madonna and Saint Joseph, by Pietro di Belverte and a gift of Don Pedro de Toledo, once in the niche of the altar of the Madonna del Parto, are now displayed in the diocesan museum, where the polychrome statue of Saint James from the old church is also to be found: look for them there.
