There is one thing worth knowing before you get to Collemaggio, because it changes the way you look at it: the first jubilee in the history of the Church was not proclaimed in Rome but here, in a meadow outside the walls of L’Aquila, six years before Boniface VIII’s of 1300.
It was proclaimed by an eighty-year-old hermit who had just been made pope inside this church, and who a few months later would renounce the papacy. The bull he signed granted the forgiveness of sins to anyone who came through that door between the vespers of 28 and 29 August, with nothing to pay and nobody to go through.
Seven centuries later people still come through, on the same dates. And the church you walk into has only been standing for nine years: the 2009 earthquake brought down its transept and its vaults, and it reopened on 20 December 2017 after a restoration that went on to win a European prize.
Admission is free, the basilica opens every day, and it stands in a park ten minutes on foot from the centre.
Who Pietro da Morrone was, and why he wanted a church this big
Why would a hermit who lived in a cave have the largest church in the Abruzzo of his day built? Because Pietro da Morrone was no ordinary hermit: he was the founder of a monastic congregation that carried his name, a man with a network of monasteries and a reputation for holiness that reached the curia. Building at L’Aquila, a young and growing city, meant giving his religious family a home on the plain.
The basilica was founded in 1287 and consecrated on 25 August 1288, with eight bishops present. Six years later, after a conclave deadlocked for more than two years, the cardinals elected him pope, and he was crowned here on 29 August 1294 as Celestine V.
The rest is the most famous and the shortest story in the medieval papacy: Celestine resigned in December of the same year, and tradition identifies him with the man «who made the great refusal through cowardice» in Dante’s Inferno. He was canonised in 1313, and his body returned to where he had begun.
The facade: how to read a chequered wall
Stop in front of the facade and notice the first thing that does not add up: there is no gable. It is a flat rectangle, closed off horizontally, like a screen set in front of the church.
That rectangle is faced with blocks in two colours, white and pink, laid out in chequers and lozenges in a pattern that covers the whole surface without a break. It is the signature of medieval Abruzzese architecture, and you will find it again, identical, on the walls of the fountain of the 99 spouts a kilometre from here: two wildly different monuments with the same facing.
Then count the rose windows, because there are three and not one. The largest sits high up in the centre, and in the photograph you can see the stone tracery filling it like a wheel of spokes. The other two, smaller, sit in the lower register on either side of the great portal. Three rose windows and three portals: the facade declares the three aisles it has inside, and it does so twice.
The three portals, and the eagle carved on the arch
The central portal is the most heavily worked part of the building: concentric archivolts receding into the thickness of the wall, twisted columns, bands of leaves and rosettes carved one at a time. The two side portals repeat the scheme in miniature and keep traces of fresco in their lunettes.
There is one detail almost nobody looks up to find, and here it earns the pause.
Above one of the archivolts, resting on a corbel set into rough masonry, there is a stone eagle with open wings and a scaled breast. In a city whose name means «the eagle», that is not just any decoration, and you only see it if you look up while standing very close to the door.
The Perdonanza: the jubilee that comes before all the others
What exactly is the Perdonanza, and why does it matter? It is the plenary indulgence granted by the bull Celestine V signed on 29 September 1294, and the difference from later jubilees lies in two words of the text: the pardon applied to anyone, with no condition of wealth, on entering this basilica between the vespers of 28 August and those of the 29th.
The rite has never been interrupted since. Every year, on the evening of the 28th, a cardinal sent by the pope opens the Holy Door of Collemaggio with an olive branch. This is the first Holy Door in history and it precedes the one at St Peter’s by two centuries. In 2026 it was opened by Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça at 21:10 on Friday 28 August.
On 12 December 2019, in Bogotá, the intergovernmental committee of UNESCO inscribed the Perdonanza Celestiniana on the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. It is the only UNESCO recognition L’Aquila holds, and it does not concern a building: it concerns a rite.
Careful: if you come for the Perdonanza, be aware that on those two days you do not visit the basilica, you pass through it. Anyone who wants to look at the church properly should come at another time of year.
Inside: the church the restoration returned to the Middle Ages
The interior takes aback anyone expecting the baroque that almost every great Italian church carries. There is none here: three aisles divided by octagonal piers and pointed arches, bare stone walls, a roof of exposed timber trusses and a floor of red and white chequers.
What you see is the result of a twentieth-century restoration decision, which removed the superstructures added over the centuries in order to return the basilica to its fourteenth-century form. It is a debatable and much debated choice, as all of that kind are, but it has one effect nobody disputes: the structure reads whole, from the first bay to the apse, and the church looks longer than it is.
The light comes in low and from the side, through the narrow windows of the aisles. At the far end, the apse lit up bright acts as the vanishing point for the whole perspective.
The mausoleum of Celestine V, and the reliquaries taken twice
In the chapel on the right stands the mausoleum of Celestine V, carved by Girolamo da Vicenza in 1517: a white marble aedicule on two registers, its pediment filled by a relief of a bearded God the Father between two cherub heads, and the saint’s tomb behind an iron grille divided by a small column.
Look around the aedicule and notice the contrast, because it proves that the stripping of the baroque from the nave never reached this far: the chapel is gilded, with stucco and cherubs in the spandrels, and the white sixteenth-century marble sits inside it like a found object.
The story of the reliquaries, then, tells you about this tomb’s bad luck better than any commentary could. The first was silver, and it was stolen in 1528. The second, also silver, was taken away by the French in 1799. The third, the one there now, is gilded wood: after twice, they stopped using precious metal.
The labyrinth, the Templars, and what can actually be said
A generous esoteric literature circulates about Collemaggio, and it is worth separating the three levels, because they are not the same.
The first level is a fact: there is a two-tone labyrinth pattern in the floor, and you can see it.
The second level is what the sanctuary itself states: on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption to which the basilica is dedicated, and at the summer solstice, the rays passing through the main rose window strike the great two-light window of the apse and the labyrinth design. If seeing that interests you, those are the two dates.
The third level is the one to leave alone, and this needs saying plainly because it is the part you find most easily online. The numerological readings of the labyrinth, the ones that count arms and offshoots to derive astronomical figures, and the idea that the basilica was a Templar house have no documentary support. The Templar myth in particular was born between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has since attached itself to any medieval building with an unusual geometry. Scholars who work on these symbols urge caution for a technical reason: a geometric pattern lends itself to too many readings, and without documents the choice between one and another is made by the reader.
2009, and the building site that won a European prize
The earthquake of 6 April 2009 struck Collemaggio where it was weakest: the transept collapsed, along with the vaults and the piers that held them, and the organ was all but destroyed. The facade, which is the famous part, held.
The restoration is the most quoted technical episode of the L’Aquila reconstruction, and the dates are clear-cut. The site opened on 25 November 2015, was funded entirely by Eni and brought together the heritage authority, the Politecnico di Milano, the Sapienza in Rome and the University of L’Aquila. The basilica reopened on 20 December 2017, just over two years later. The sum spent, on the other hand, is published by no official source, and the figure that circulates online has no primary one behind it.
In 2020 that work received the European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra in the conservation category. It is not a ceremonial prize: the citation concerns the method, namely having rebuilt the collapsed parts with a seismic upgrade instead of putting them back as they were.
Practical information
Details checked on 7 September 2026 on the website of the sanctuary of Santa Maria di Collemaggio and on the portals of the diocese of L’Aquila. Hours and liturgical calendars change: check again before you travel, especially if you want to attend a mass.
Admission. Admission is free and there is no need to book.
Opening hours. From November to April the basilica opens from 9:00 to 18:00, and from May to October from 9:00 to 19:00. There is no weekly closing day.
Masses. From November to April they are at 17:30 on weekdays and at 10:30 and 17:30 on Sunday; from May to October at 18:30 on weekdays and at 10:30 and 18:30 on Sunday.
Getting there. The basilica stands at piazzale Collemaggio 5, inside the park of the same name, about ten minutes on foot from the public gardens and the old town. The forecourt is flat and the entrance is level.
How long it takes. Forty minutes is enough for the church and the mausoleum. If you also want to walk round the park and see the flank with the apse, allow an hour.
The phone number. The visitor number is 392 2676651, and it is mainly of use for group visits.
Why see it
Collemaggio is not the richest church you will see in Italy, and since the baroque was stripped out it is not even the most decorated in Abruzzo. It is, however, one of the few in which the history that matters can be read off the stones without captions: a facade that declares the structure, a door a jubilee has passed through for seven centuries, and a transept that is nine years old.
Seen before the other stops, moreover, it puts everything that follows in order. The Spanish fort with the MuNDA tells the same story from the side of power, the basilica of San Bernardino tells it from the side of the Renaissance, and the MAXXI at Palazzo Ardinghelli brings it to the present.
The two days in full are in the guide on what to see in L’Aquila.
Photographs: the interior by Maurizio Moro5153, the rose window by Rocco D’Errico, the portal detail by Syrio, the carved eagle by Rocco D’Errico and the mausoleum by Lasacrasillaba, all CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
