Cappella delle Suore del Sacro Cuore del Verbo Incarnato is an early 20th century convent chapel at Via Giuseppe Antonio Guattani 7 in the Nomentano quarter.
History[]
The "Sisters of the Sacred Heart of the Incarnate Word" (Suore del Sacro Cuore del Verbo Incarnato) were founded at Palermo, Sicily by Mother Carmela Prestigiacomo in 1884, and received papal approval in 1930.
The congregation established its Generalate (headquarters) at Rome, by purchasing a four-storey suburban villa. Instead of merely using a room in the edifice as a chapel, they then built what amounts to a little church in the back garden.
The congregation has only two sister resident in Rome (2019), and run a school called Profughi d'Africa at Via Ludovico Cardi 9. The Diocese is no longer listing the Generalate, and it seems that the sisters are looking to close it. If so, nothing seems to have been announced yet.
Appearance[]
The chapel is a three-bay rectangular structure, rendered in pale orange and with its own neo-Baroque façade. An ancillary wing abuts on the left hand side, and the sanctuary back wall is blank. The roof is pitched and tiled.
Three round-headed windows are fairly low down on the right hand side, matched by three square windows just below the eaves.
The façade has a single entrance enclosed in an arch, with imposts and a white stone tympanum. Above is a round window in a molded frame. A molded string course runs across the façade either side of this, and dodges over the window frame via a semi-circular archivolt. The gable roofline is decorated with an arcade of pendant blind arches in white, springing from little corbels and with proportionally tall "piers".
An unusual feature of the façade is the presence of a flat-topped screen wall above the gable roofline, just slightly higher than the gable tip and having vertical sides at the lower corners of the gable. What was this for?