The church of San Matteo is the mother church of Nocera Inferiore. It is recorded as early as the late tenth century as San Matteo «de Archiponticulo», at the old bridge, after a Roman stone bridge over a stream that ran down from Montalbino, identified in the excavations in piazza del Corso. According to the sources it rose where a shrine of Janus, the two-faced god, had stood, and was dedicated to Saint Matthew, popularly known as the saint with two faces.
What to see
Born as a rectory, it became a parish in 1390, and since 1592 it has been the town's mother church, when Bishop Sulpizio Costantino transferred the title to it from Sant'Angelo in Grotta. Here on 20 September 1614 the Duke of Nocera Francesco Maria Carafa married Anna Pignatelli, and on 2 October 1655 the painter Angelo Solimena married Marta Resigniano. The façade dates from a sixteenth-century remodelling and work in the thirties of the twentieth century; above the portal in the grey tuff of Nocera is a roundel with the saint. Damaged by the Irpinia earthquake of 1980, the church was closed in 1990 and reopened on 25 November 2000.
The interior has three naves, with the large chapels of the confraternities of the Monte dei Morti and of Saint Lucy; two side altars come from the disused Benedictine church of San Giovanni in Parco. The high altarpiece, with the Virgin and Child between Saint Matthew and Saint Peter, was painted in 1706 by Angelo Solimena with help from his son Francesco. In the chapel of the Sacrament is a sixteenth-century roundel of the Madonna of the Rosary surrounded by the fifteen mysteries, attributed to the workshop of Marco Pino of Siena; the nave was frescoed in 1934 by the Nocera painter Maiorino Palmerino.
Visiting
Opening and service times should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
The Deposition painted by Angelo Solimena in 1664, stolen in the seventies or eighties, was found by chance in April 2024 at the Galleria nazionale delle Marche in Urbino and returned to the parish on 30 May of the same year.
