Luogo - Religious building
CHIESA DI SANT'ANTONIO DA PADOVA
Where
Via degli Alpini, Scanno (L'Aquila)
The church of Saint Antony from Padua and the convent of Friars Minor Conventual adjoining it rises outside the town in the surrounding of Santa Maria del Lago, a few kilometers away from the historical center of Scanno. According to tradition, the convent was founded between 1595 and 1596 in the area of the hospital of Scanno, which was donated to the town at that moment. Enlarged in the seventeenth century, the building was deserted when Napoleon ordered the suppression of the order and definitively sold to private citizens in the XIX century.
The façade of the church is similar to the one of Santa Maria della Valle, built about thirty years before within the Historical center of Scanno; on the external wall a horizontal cornice separates the sixteenth-century portal from the rose-window in Medieval style.
The plan consists of one barrel-vaulted nave, with three chapels on each side. The presbytery has a cross-vaulted ceiling and a small cupola.
The interior is entirely decorated in stucco and enriched with a confessional and a pulpit, both made of wood and dated to the eighteenth century. On the vault there are three imposing frescoes by Giambattista Gamba (dated to 1728) representing three Franciscan saints: Saint Antony, Saint Francis and Saint Bonaventura.
