Church of San Benedetto Abate

The mother church of San Benedetto Abate was built in the town of Controguerra starting from 1610, on the site of a previous, smaller church dedicated to San Pietro Apostolo. For some years the sacred building bore both titles, San Benedetto Abate («pievania nuncupata») and San Pietro Apostolo (official title). Between 1642 and 1665 the church lost the previous title of San Pietro Apostolo and today it is known only with the parish title of San Benedetto Abate.

The structure was restored between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact, the previous church suffered serious damage following a storm in 1790. The new church was inaugurated on April 15, 1810 and respects the classical styles of the Napoleonic era, still evident today.

The facade consists of two distinct bodies, with two high pilasters. The pediment is curvilinear and the portal is in stone, with a neoclassical tympanum, containing an epigraph that recalls the restoration of the Napoleonic era, surmounted by a municipal coat of arms from the coeval era. In the upper part of the facade there is a rectangular window. There is also an opening in the upper curvilinear tympanum, but it is circular in shape.

The bell tower is a tower, leaning against the apse, and ends with a decorative octagonal spire. The previous bell tower, which collapsed in 1790, perhaps reflected the Spanish taste of the seventeenth century and had a "sail" shape, like that of the Madonna delle Grazie.

Inside, the church has a large central nave with a rectangular plan and a more modern right aisle, dating back to 1858, also with a rectangular plan. The style is neoclassical, embellished by tall columns, now white, which in the twentieth century had a painting that referred to marble (first yellow, then green, after a restoration in the early nineties). The aisles are separated from each other by round arches. The roof of the naves is flat and has no pictorial decorations.

The presbytery is raised, with a side chapel, on the left, which gives access to the sacristy and the bell tower. The apse is embellished by the high reliefs, created by the master Pietro Vitali of Foligno, in 1972, on the occasion of the restorations following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. A few years earlier, to implement the provisions of the Council, the marble gate that separated the audience from the presbytery was eliminated. The high reliefs on the left side represent Benedictine monks and a Franciscan friar, those on the right the parish community that gathers around the shepherd, who looks like Pope Paul VI. The central high relief depicts San Benedetto Abate, patron saint of Europe, who governs and protects the parish, idealized with three emblematic buildings: on the left is the tower, in the center the mother church of San Benedetto Abate and on the right the church of the Madonna delle Grazie, with the peculiarity that, in the representation, it does not have a bell tower, but a tower, because in the 1950s and 1960s a project was being studied which involved the demolition of the old bell tower, which was believed to be unrecoverable due to the damage it had suffered on the occasion of the earthquake of 1943. The scene is embellished by two angels, also in high relief. The apse is dominated by a vault on which a superb image of the Madonna is frescoed, in the guise of Divina Pastora, with the Child Jesus. The fresco recalls, in fact, the devotion of the counter-war people to the Divina Pastorizia.

To the right of the presbytery is set a marble plaque in memory of the golden mass of Don Nicola Paolini, a historic Controguerra priest who officiated there between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.

At the end of the right aisle is the altar dedicated to the Blessed Sacrament. The two windows of the nave are adorned with artistic glass, which depict the two co-patrons of the town: San Pietro Apostolo and San Pasquale Baylon.

The church housed a valuable organ from the convent of San Francesco and reassembled in the mid-nineteenth century by the Venetian organist Quirico Gennari, who lived in Lanciano at the time. The organ was placed in the choir loft above the main entrance, but neither the organ nor the choir loft have survived to this day. The choir was dismantled during the restoration of the sixties.

The building was seriously damaged by the 2016 earthquake in Central Italy and was reopened to the public, after restoration and safety measures, in 2019. During the aforementioned restorations, the columns were whitewashed, as I mentioned above.