Santa Galla is a modern parish church at Circonvallazione Ostiense 195 in the north of the suburb of Garbatella in the Ostiense district. Pictures of the church on Wikimedia Commons. [1]
It preserves the memory of Santa Galla Antiqua, an ancient church and hospital founded in the 6th century, that stood north of the Boca della Verità until it was demolished on Mussolini's instructions to create the Via del Mare. The Fascist government offered to fund the new church.
Exterior
It was designed by Tullio Rossi to a neo-Romanesque design, and finally completed in 1940 after the Second World War had interrupted the scheme. It has a nave with aisles and a semi-circular apse, with a pitched and tiled main roof and flat aisle roofs. The exterior walls are in pinkish brick with a few architectural details in travertine limestone.
The entrance façade is mostly blank brickwork, but there is a decorative horizontal string-course of tiles, laid vertically and showing their edges, just below the travertine gabled roofline. There is an arch in the same tilework just above the centre of this. There is a tall recess below the string course, with a stepped edge and containing the main entrance door. Above the door is a tympanum with an interesting mosaic in an Impressionist style, showing two peacocks drinking from a fountain and being bitten by two snakes, with two quails below. This is a very ancient Christian symbol. Above the tympanum in the recess is a vertical rectangular window with one vertical and three horizontal stone mullions, and above that is a Papal coat of arms carved on a square stone tablet. The aisle frontages are recessed. The aisle entrances are of the same height as the main one, but instead of tympani have transom windows with mullions in the shape of a Greek cross. This pattern of window is repeated in the nave clerestory above the aisles, seven on each side.
The other interesting feature of the façade is the propylaeum, which is not a porch because it has no roof except over the aisle entrances. A horizontal stone beam runs in front of the façade for its entire length, supported on the outer corners and between nave and aisle frontages by double square pilasters. In front of the nave frontage it is supported by a pair of single pilasters.
The rather squat campanile, just slightly taller than the church, is attached to the left hand side of the entrance façade. It is a plain square brick tower with large vertical rectangular sound holes.
Interior
The walls are in white, and the trussed roof is of dark timbers. The only colour comes from the pink marble aisle columns, which do not support an arcade but a horizontal architrave. Their simplified Doric capitals (little better than imposts) are in ochre yellow. An organ occupies the apse behind the altar, entered through a large arch. This is an ugly arrangement, but the instrument itself is of very high quality. The high altar, unusually small, contains ancient stone reliefs of the 1st century from the site of the old church. At the end of the left hand aisle is the Blessed Sacrament chapel, with a depiction of the Supper at Emmaus, and at the end of the right hand aisle is a 17th century painting from the old church depicting the Vision of St Galla.