The façade of the Annunziata is built entirely from stone taken off the nearby Roman theatre. Among the blocks is an inscription in which an amphora sits inside a festoon of grapes and vine leaves, and at the foot of the side elevation, on via De Utris, press bases surface in the masonry. The church stands in the upper part of Venafro, on Largo Annunziata, below the Castello Pandone, and carries the tallest bell tower in town. In 1386 the members of the Confraternity of the Flagellants signed the founding deed of the Confraternity of the Annunziata; among themselves the brothers still call the church la Lenziana.
What to see
The exterior is a stack of successive campaigns. Ribs and masonry seams give away the axis of the old façade, off-centre with respect to the present doorway: the lines of the original pointed-arch portal and of the rose window above it can still be read. Pieces of that portal were reset in the new one, a splayed round arch with a central lunette and the statue of San Nazario beneath a winged cornice. Above it opens a large Baroque window and, at the top, a Greek-cross window with concave sides that resolves into a kind of quatrefoil. The bell tower is Baroque but rests on the lower stone stage of the Gothic campanile, where blocked pointed two-light windows survive; the onion spire is the work of Neapolitan craftsmen.
Visiting
Inside, the single nave is covered by a wide vault of plastered cane-work, with the Virgin in glory among saints and apostles at its centre. Three chapels a side hold the secondary altars, alternating with the load-bearing piers. The high altar rises on three steps of polychrome marble; its canvas is the Annunciation by Giacinto Diano. The dome was begun in 1618 at the wish of the prior Francesco Coppa and rests on four pendentives carrying allegories of the four Virtues, while the lantern drops light straight onto the presbytery. On the inner façade the wooden organ of 1784, carved and painted by Nicola Abbate of Airola, was returned to use by the restoration of 2003.
Our editors' tip
In a side chapel, behind a grille, the reliquary bust of San Nicandro is kept together with the saint's gilded head. The processions of 16 and 18 June set out from here and return here: anyone in Venafro on those days sees the church in actual use, and not as a monument.