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San Filippo Neri di Villa Cidonio is an 18th century public farmstead chapel at Via Cassia 129, in the Della Vittoria quarter.

History[]

The Villa Cidonio enters into the historical record as a farmstead on the Via Cassia at the end of the 17th century, at a time when the locality was entirely rural and thinly populated

The chapel was built as a public facility in the 18th century, when the farmstead was remodelled as a country villa with gardens. There is a tablet on the street-side façade of the villa dated 1786, giving the owner as Luigi Sicuranp. The Cidonio family owned it in the 19th century, hence the name.

It has been a long time since the chapel was a public place of worship, and it might be deconsecrated.

Apperarance[]

The main block of the villa complex stands right on the street, and is a two-storey edifice with a belvedere. The chapel has its own architectural identity, although it is now joined to the main building by a lower two-storey extension. This was obviously added after the chapel, as the original screen wall with a ball finial was kept for the first storey.

The chapel itself is a tiny rectangular building, with a pitched and tiled roof having a hip at the sanctuary end. The fabric is in brick, rendered in a yellow ochre colour. A low sacristy annexe is attached to the right hand side, and above this is a pair of horizontal rectangular windows almost square. The right hand wall has a longitudinal bell-cote or campanile, with its own tiled gable and a tall round-headed aperture which could have held two bells.

The façade has a crowning triangular pediment supported by a pair of blind pilasters, with posts above them in the entablature. The pilasters are not quite at the corners, and have stone bases. The area of the façade between them is mostly taken up by a shallow rectangular recess containing the single entrance. This has a pair of pilasters with thin doubletting up their outer edges, supporting a posted entablature with a projecting horizontal cornice. Above the latter in the main recess is no window, but instead a large horizontal rectangular sub-recess which looks like a blocked-up window.

External links[]

Info.roma web-page (the address is wrong)

Short history article

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