In December 1930 two friars, Leone Patrizio and Francesco Angelantonio Carusillo, began dismantling the high altar of the basilica: it had been walled up when the convent was suppressed, and behind it stood the sarcophagus of Saint Nicander. A rough chest, without decoration, cut from a single ancient block. Three years later, in 1933, it was installed in the rebuilt crypt that visitors still go down to.
The basilica stands at the eastern entrance to Venafro. Before 955 Basilian monks had already raised a church over the martyr's tomb, named in the Chronicon Vulturnense in connection with a Lombard donation; in November 1290 Pope Nicholas IV granted an indulgence to those who visited it. Since 1573 the complex has belonged to the Capuchin Friars Minor, who live in the convent next door. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a young and ailing Francesco Forgione stayed here: he would become Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.
What to see
The Romanesque gabled façade, in dressed stone repainted white, keeps its original rayed rose window; the portal carries a modern gold-ground mosaic. On the forecourt a stationary cross has been cut from a Roman-era column and, to the right, lies the convent cloister, round arches around a well. The interior has two naves, with late Baroque stuccowork redone in the mid-nineteenth century: a fourteenth-century wooden crucifix in the side nave, and in the apse the large inlaid choir and the altar tabernacle by Friar Berardino da Mentone, framing the altarpiece by Dirk Hendricksz, the Fleming known in Naples as Teodoro d'Errico: the Virgin and Child between Saint Francis and Saint Nicander.
Our editors' tip
Go down to the crypt slowly: the stone tomb periodically seeps a liquid that people here call santa manna, and that is why the place still matters. If you can, come between 16 and 18 June: the feast opens at midnight, the silver reliquary bust arrives in procession from the church of the Annunziata, on the 17th, the day of the martyrdom, the mayor hands the keys and the candles to the figure of Saint Nicander, and on the evening of the 18th half the town sings the hymn to the patron saints.