In August 1762 two lightning bolts struck the bell tower of Riccia's mother church during a storm: three people died and the building was damaged, but the altar and the urn of San Vitale came through untouched. The episode is still told in the town, and it explains faster than anything else how much weight this church carries in local life. Dedicated to the Assumption of Mary, it stands north of the built-up area, in the old centre, next to the town hall.
What to see
The fabric is 13th-century and Romanesque; enlarged and partly rebuilt in the 18th century, it was reconsecrated in 1765. What survives from the Middle Ages is mainly the portal and the capitals: foliage and animal figures, and in the cornice frieze the arms of the families of Bartolomeo de Capoa and Aurelia Orsini. The exterior seen today, however, is an early 20th-century reworking, its dressed stone laid up into a pseudo-Romanesque salient front; the medieval bell tower is a shaft with a spire.
Visiting
The interior is Baroque, with three aisles. At the end of the left aisle a chapel opens under a ribbed cross vault and a Gothic arch, and there is the Dormitio Virginis, painted around 1480 by Silvestro Buono, a pupil of Antonio Solario: a Neapolitan work that ended up in a Fortore village, and reason enough on its own to stop. On the opposite wall a local hermit is depicted, Blessed Stefano Corumano, with the Virgin and Child. Among the statues is a St Augustine of 1726, carved in Naples by Giovanni Buonavita. The high altar is of local stone, inlaid with serpentine marble.
Our editors' tip
Ask about the relics: the church keeps those of San Ciriaco, Santa Massimiliana, San Mercurio, San Timoteo and San Vitale, along with the arm of Blessed Stefano Corumano. Those of San Vitale came from Rome at the initiative of Nicola de Capua, administrator of the Prince of Riccia, and entered the town in a great procession, in the same urn the lightning would spare a few years later.