San Giuda Taddeo della Città dei Ragazzi is a later 20th century orphanage chapel which became a parish church in 2019. The postal address is Largo Città dei Ragazzi 1 in the Ponte Galeria zone, the suburb being Spallette. The actual location within the Città dei Ragazzi complex is the Piazza Texas.
The dedication is to St Jude the Apostle.
The church is in the municipality, but belongs to the diocese of Porto Santa Rufina.
History[]
The Città dei Ragazzi is a large orphanage and vocational training complex founded on a green field site in 1953. It was provided with a large chapel in 1968, the architect being Angelo Cecchini.
The chapel became a church in 2019, when the parish of San Paolo VI was founded and dedicated to Pope St Paul VI. A restoration of the building was part of the process, and this was completed in 2020.
Appearance[]
The church is a circular structure in raw shuttered concrete, looking like a pill-box or an enormous slice of concrete pipe. It has a singly-pitched roof at the level of the top of the wall, which slopes up along the major axis. This makes the wall low at front, and higher behind the altar.
The main source of natural illumination is a large louvre skylight over the altar. The actual fenestration is in the form of an isosceles triangle on a steep slope facing the front of the church, and this is set in a three-sided turret.
The entrance is via a porch on a triangular plan, attached to the bottom right hand side of the church. This has a flat roof, lower than the main one. The entrance is in the side nearer the altar which is completely open, and the other side is occupied by an incurved wall decorated with an abstract composition formed of curvaceous slabs of stone within the porch.
This porch is flanked by a pair of protrusions in the form of a vertical segment of a cylinder.
The sacristy block is also low and flat-roofed, and clasps the back of the church.
Liturgy[]
Mass times:
Weekdays 17:00;
Saturdays and eves of Solemnities 18:00;
Sundays and Solemnities 10:30.