Sant’Elena all’Esquilino is a 19th century convent chapel dependent on the parish of Sant'Eusebio all'Esquilino , and is located at Via Machiavelli 24 off the Via Merulana. Pictures of the church on Wikipedia Commons are here.
The dedication is to St Helen the Empress.
Exterior
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It was designed by Ettore Genuini, and was completed in a French Gothic style in 1899 as the convent chapel of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary.
The exterior of the convent looks rather like an attempt at a Venetian town house, rendered in pinkish-grey. There are four storeys, with the entrance through a Gothic archway on the right hand side. The windows are Gothic lancets, in triplets or singly, except for the fourth storey which has a row of seven behind a pilaster colonnade. The entrance archway has an inscription dedicating the building in honour of St Helen, and above there is a pictorial tiled panel depicting the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
InteriorEdit
The interior is a small but tall and vaulted single nave, with stained-glass windows and a little circular apse framed by a Gothic archway. The apse itself has six round pilasters with capitals, supporting a sketchy attempt at vaulting in the conch, and there is a fresco of St Helen between the central pair. The archway bears a Latin inscription in Gothic script: Et verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis. This is a quotation from the prologue of the Gospel of St John, and translates “And the Word was made flesh, and lived among us”.
