San Giovanni Battista in Collatino is a modern parish church at Via Sandro Sandri 73 in the Collatino district, between the Via Tiburtina and the Strada dei Parchi. The main entrance is on Via Leone Fortis, a side street. Pictures of the church at Wikimedia Commons. [1]
The parish has been administered by Opus Dei since its foundation.
Exterior
The church was designed by Antonpaolo Savio and completed in 1965. It is a building of high quality for its period, being distantly inspired by the neo-Romanesque style. The plan is an irregular hexagon, with two long sides forming the side walls, two short ones giving an angle to the entrance façade, two not so short ones either side of the altar and a short one behind the altar. See the aerial photos on the external link to make sense of this. The roof is of one sweep, pitched and hipped. The angled entrance façade is in pink stone slabs, and has a projecting atrium with a flat roof. The rooflines of this and the main frontage have deep concrete eaves, and below them are slit windows except over the actual entrance. Above the entrance the angle of the façade is truncated to the roofline to make a space for a large rectangular stained glass window, and this also gives a hint of a pediment in the projecting eaves above it. The pink stone walls either side of this window are decorated with a motif of two thin vertical concrete strips crossed by a horizontal one low down.
The exterior side walls of the church have a similar decorative scheme, in pink stone separated into almost square zones by the concrete pilasters of the framework of the building. Along the main side walls are three of these zones, decorated with the concrete strips and separated by three narrow vertical rectangular windows below the roof eaves. Below these panels are external side chapels. The far side walls have two zones, with horizontal slit windows halfway up and below the eaves, and no chapels. Behind the altar there are vertical slit windows at the corners, connected by a horizontal one at the top. There is no campanile.
Interior
The pink panelling with concrete strip decoration is replicated in the interior. The entrances to the side chapels are rectangular, formed of concrete pillars and beams. There is good-quality abstract stained glass in the windows. Amazingly for the Sixties, the presbyterium walls are decorated with polychrome stone panelling reminiscent of the original scheme in the Pantheon.