Sant'Eligio a Villaggio Prenestino is a 20th century parish church in an obscure location at Via Fossa dell'Osa in the township of Villaggio Prenestino. The road it is on connects the village of Lunghezza on the Strada dei Parchi with Largo Regillo on the Via Prenestina, and runs through an unplanned and haphazardly developed exurban (rather than properly suburban) district. The district is Lunghezza.
The patron saint is Eligius of Noyon.
History
The parish was set up in 1963, but had to wait until 1990 before the church was finished.
Appearance
The church is a simple Modernist design, avoiding Brutalism.
The plan is a simple rectangle, with a rectangular apse attached. The external walls are in yellow brick blocks and there is a flat roof. The side walls are divided equally by a narrow string course in cream, and in between this and the ground and roofline are two grey concrete beams running horizontally the full length. Near front and back on each wall is a window protected by a cage of vertical steel bars.
There is a cross-shaped metal sculpture attached to a horizontal bracket projecting from the roofline just behind the left hand corner of the façade.
The façade itself has two storeys. The first one, as high as the entrance, is wider than the building and continues on either side as a screen wall. It is in yellow brick, with a grey concrete plinth (which is assymetric, being horizontal on the right but going down a step on the left). The cream string course features in the centre, and the upper edge is a wide beige stripe.
The entrance doorway has a triple triangular canopy in dark red, and is approached by a flight of three steps. Above the doorway, the second storey has a beige background. There is a rectangular window in the centre, and a narrower one on each corner.
Twenty-two vertical concrete pilasters stripe the frontage, one passing over each side window and two over the central window. These float at their bottom ends, where each has a small black disc (rather like the eye of a needle) and each pair is separated by a red block. At the roofline, the pilasters are connected by a red zig-zag on a grey background. The effect is surprisingly whimsical.