Type:

Luoghi della cultura; Oggetto fisico

Category:

Religious buildings; Art museums

The church consecrated to Madonna delle Grazie - patron saint of Teramo along with Saint Berardo - and the convent adjoining it lie in a wide place outside the eastern town-gate. The building was probably founded in the eleventh-twelfth century, as a branch-church of the important monastery of Benedictine Nuns dedicated to Saint Angel of Women. Saint Giacomo della Marca decided to enlarge the building in 1448, in order to house the Franciscan Friars and bestowed upon the church a magnificent sculpture by Silvestro from L'Aquila, representing the Virgin with the Child, which still decorates the high altar. The restoration carried out between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century affected the brick façade and the frontward arcade as well as the interior, at Latin cross with dome-shaped chapels on the sides, which Cesare Mariani frescoed in 1897. The Romanic cloister has preserved for the most part its original aspect. In one of the side chapels a noteworthy detached fresco is kept: it portrays a scene of Majesty and saints inserted in a fifteenth-century structure with a tympanum and Professor Bologna attributed it to Pietro Alamanno.