The patron saint of L’Aquila is Maximus, the saint the cathedral is named after. But the most ambitious church the city ever built for itself is dedicated to a Sienese passing through, who died here by chance in 1444 while on his way somewhere else.
His name was Bernardino and he was the most listened-to preacher in Italy; his death at L’Aquila turned the city into a place of pilgrimage. Six years later he was a saint; ten years later the city began building him this basilica, and took almost a century to finish it.
The result is the church that repays the journey more than the others, for a reason that has nothing to do with devotion: inside are the two finest sculptures of the Abruzzese Renaissance, and the same man made them, a local artist who signed himself Silvestro dell’Aquila.
Admission is free, the basilica opens every day from 7:00 to 19:00, and after the 2009 earthquake it became visitable again on 2 May 2015.
Why a Sienese is the saint L’Aquila chose
Bernardino degli Albizzeschi, born at Massa Marittima and raised in Siena, spent thirty years walking Italy to preach in its squares, with a capacity to fill them that nobody rivalled. His emblem, the IHS trigram inside a radiant sun, he had painted on small boards that he raised in front of the crowd in place of images of the saints: it was a way of preaching, and it became a trademark.
He died at L’Aquila on 20 May 1444, in a friary outside the walls, during a journey towards Naples. He was canonised by Nicholas V on 24 May 1450, six years and four days after his death: one of the fastest canonisations of the fifteenth century.
What did L’Aquila gain from it? The body. In a fifteenth-century city the relics of a newly canonised saint were worth as much as a harbour: they brought pilgrims, alms, prestige and art commissions. The basilica was begun in 1454 and the structure was completed in 1472. If the Sienese other side of this story interests you, the guide to Siena covers the city that formed him and never managed to get him back.
The staircase, and the right way to arrive
The basilica stands at the top of a very wide staircase, paved in cobbles, which rises between two rows of cedars and has a stone shrine on either side. It is not a piece of scenery: it is the way the church was meant to be seen.
The practical advice, and it is worth a five-minute detour: arrive from below, from via Fortebraccio, and walk up. Anyone who arrives from above, from the side, gets the facade right in their face and loses the point of it, because that facade is designed to be looked at in perspective from a distance, with sky around it.
At the top the forecourt is flat and the entrance is level, so the staircase can be avoided by coming round from via Vittorio Veneto.
Cola dell’Amatrice’s facade: three orders, one above the other
How do you make a facade twice as tall as it is wide without it looking like a tower? The solution Cola dell’Amatrice, or Nicola Filotesio, adopts here is the simplest and the hardest: you stack three classical orders, each one complete, and let the horizontal entablature brake the eye at every level.
Count them on the way up. At the bottom the Tuscan order, with four pairs of columns and the three portals; in the middle the Ionic, with the great window and two round oculi closed by grilles; at the top the Corinthian, narrower, with more oculi and corner pilasters. Each order has its own massive cornice, and the facade rises in steps instead of shooting upwards.
Across the frieze of the second order runs the dedicatory inscription in Latin capitals, naming the saint and the city: it can be read from the ground, and in the photograph it comes out clearly.
The facade was completed in 1542, seventy years after the church: it is therefore a sixteenth-century, Roman-speaking front set against a fifteenth-century body. The discontinuity shows, and it is not a flaw.
The saint’s mausoleum, and the monogram he himself had spread
The mausoleum of San Bernardino is the machine Silvestro dell’Aquila built between 1489 and 1505, commissioned by the merchant Jacopo di Notar Nanni, who with this work bought himself a memory that has lasted.
It is a piece of architecture rather than a tomb: four corner pilasters carrying an entablature, a lunette with a blessing relief on top, and between the pilasters a band of carved compartments, with an enthroned figure at the centre and saints in the side niches. Below, the burial itself sits behind an iron grille of crossed mesh.
Look up, though, because the reward is above. The dome of the chapel is frescoed with the saint rising in glory among a crowd of figures, and at the summit, at the highest point, is the IHS monogram inside a radiant sun.
It is the same emblem Bernardino used to raise on his boards in front of the crowds. The sign he had invented as a preaching device ends up painted at the top of the dome above his own body, in a fresco centuries later: whoever painted it closed the circle the preacher had opened.
Maria and Beatrice: the sculpture you do not walk away from
In the chapel beside the high altar stands Silvestro’s other work, and it is the one critics consider his most moving. Look at it from top to bottom, in three stages.
At the top, a round arch covered in festoons of fruit and flowers carved in full relief, with four saints in the corner niches and a medallion bearing the IHS monogram on the keystone.
At the centre, above a sarcophagus decorated with festoons and cherub heads, the effigy of a young woman, hands laid together, her head on two tasselled cushions.
And then, and here the sculpture changes in kind: beneath the sarcophagus, resting on the base, lies a second effigy, a very small child, between two kneeling putti.
Who are they? The monument was commissioned in 1488 by Maria Pereyra Camponeschi, and the commission covered two tombs at once: that of her daughter Beatrice, who died before her, and her own. The mother above, the daughter below. The patron here was not a merchant buying himself a memory: it was a mother burying a daughter. The difference shows in the decision to put both figures at life size, one above the other, rather than devoting two separate monuments to them.
Andrea della Robbia’s Resurrection
In a side chapel there is a piece you do not expect in L’Aquila, because it is Florentine in make: a large Resurrection in glazed terracotta by Andrea della Robbia, white figures on a blue ground, which arrived here on commission.
Read it by registers, from the bottom. Below, the sleeping soldiers and one waking with a start; at the centre the risen Christ standing on the sarcophagus, hand raised in blessing; at the sides kneeling saints and angels; above, within the same relief, a second subject, the Coronation of the Virgin, with Christ setting the crown on her head among angels. A predella with four small scenes closes it off at the bottom.
The frame around it is eighteenth-century stucco, with two large angels at the sides and putti above: a Florentine quattrocento work set into a local baroque. If this technique interests you, the Bargello Museum in Florence holds the glazed terracottas of the same workshop and the same family.
The eighteenth-century ceiling, and the 1725 organ
The central nave is covered by a carved and gilded wooden coffered ceiling that Ferdinando Mosca of Pescocostanzo built between 1723 and 1727, incorporating paintings by Girolamo Cenatiempo.
It is the piece that explains why this church did not share the fate of Collemaggio, where the twentieth-century restoration removed the baroque additions to take everything back to the Middle Ages. Here the baroque stayed, and the church reads in two superimposed layers instead of one.
The same Mosca made the resonance case of the organ, built in 1725 by Feliciano Fedeli. Case and instrument are contemporary and were designed together, which is less common than it sounds.
2009, and the reopening of 2015
The earthquake of 6 April 2009 struck San Bernardino in two places: the bell tower partly collapsed and the apse, along with the drum of the dome, was badly cracked. Cola dell’Amatrice’s facade, like Collemaggio’s, held.
The restoration returned the basilica to worship on 2 May 2015, before Collemaggio and before the national museum: it was one of the first major reopenings in the old town, and it is the reason why, in the years when the rest of the city was shut, this church served as a point of reference.
Practical information
Details checked on 7 September 2026 on the official website of the basilica of San Bernardino, cross-checked against the Abruzzo regional portal. Hours and liturgical calendars change: check again before you travel.
Admission. Admission is free and there is no need to book.
Opening hours. The basilica is open to the public every day from 7:00 to 19:00. There is no weekly closing day, and it is the monument in L’Aquila with the widest opening hours.
Masses. On feast days they are at 8:30, 11:30 and 18:30; on weekdays at 7:00 and 18:30. Visiting the chapels during services is not advisable.
Getting there. The address is via Vittorio Veneto 3, in the heart of the old town, five minutes on foot from piazza del Duomo. Anyone wanting to avoid the staircase goes in from the via Vittorio Veneto side, where the forecourt is level.
How long it takes. Forty minutes for the two Silvestro sculptures, the Della Robbia and the ceiling. Twenty, if you only look at the saint’s mausoleum and the nave.
The phone number. The basilica’s number is 0862 200390.
Why go in
If you are short of time in L’Aquila and have to pick one church, the answer is not automatic. Collemaggio has the greater history and the more famous facade; San Bernardino has the better works.
The reason to come in here is concentrated in a few square metres: two sculptures by the same artist, one from 1488 and one finished in 1505, the first commissioned by a mother and the second by a merchant, which show what happens when the same chisel works on two opposite briefs. Plus a Florentine terracotta, a gilded ceiling and an organ from 1725.
The rest of the city is in the guide on what to see in L’Aquila in two days; the Spanish fort with the MuNDA is ten minutes uphill from here.
Photographs: the staircase and the facade by Ra Boe (CC BY-SA 3.0), the mausoleum of San Bernardino and the ceiling by Syrio, the Pereyra Camponeschi monument and the Della Robbia Resurrection by Lasacrasillaba (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
