3 Best Sights in Toledo and the Port, Naples

This church, simple and rather anonymous from the outside, houses some of the most important ensembles of Renaissance sculpture in southern Italy. Begun with the adjacent convent of the Olivetani and its four cloisters in 1411, it was given a Baroque makeover in the mid-17th century by Gennaro Sacco.

To the left of the Ligorio Altar is the Mastrogiudice Chapel, whose altar contains Scenes from the Life of Jesus (1489) by Benedetto da Maiano, a great name in Tuscan sculpture. On the other side of the entrance is the Piccolomini Chapel, with a Crucifixion by Giulio Mazzoni (circa 1550), a refined marble altar (circa 1475), and a funerary monument to Maria d'Aragona by another prominent Florentine sculptor, Antonello Rossellino (circa 1475).

Modeled after Rome's Pantheon, this circular basilica is the centerpiece of the Piazza Plebiscito and is one of Italy's most frigidly voluptuous examples of the Stile Empire, or Neoclassical style. Commissioned by Ferdinand I to fulfill a vow he had made when enlisting divine aid to be reinstated to the throne of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, it rose at one end of a vast parade ground built several years earlier by Joachim Murat. Completed in the late 1840s after 30 years of construction, the basilica transformed Murat's grandiose colonnade—clearly inspired by the colonnades of St. Peter's in Rome—into a setting for restored Bourbon glory.

Pietro Bianchi from Lugano in Switzerland won a competition to build the slightly smaller version of the Pantheon. Although it has a beautiful coffered dome and a splendid set of 34 Corinthian columns in gray marble, its overall lack of color (so different from the warm interior of the original Pantheon) and its severe geometrical forms create an almost defiantly cold space.

Art historians find the spectacle of the church to be the ultimate in Neoclassical grandezza (greatness); others think this Roman temple is only suitable to honor Jupiter, not Christ. In any event, the main altar, done in gold, lapis lazuli, and other precious stones by Anselmo Caggiano (1641), was taken from the destroyed Church of the Santi Apostoli and provides some relief from the oppressive perfection of the setting. On a hot summer day, the church's preponderance of marble guarantees sanctuary from the heat outside, with a temperature drop of 10 or more degrees.

The Lucchesi fathers built this church around 1640 in honor of the Swedish queen and saint who visited her fellow queen, Naples's unsaintly Giovanna I, in 1372 and became one of the first people to publicly denounce the loose morals and overt sensuality of the Neapolitans. The height of the church's dome was limited to prevent its interfering with cannon fire from nearby Castel Nuovo, but Luca Giordano, the pioneer painter of the trompe-l'oeil Baroque dome, effectively opened it up with a spacious sky serving as the setting for an Apotheosis of Saint Bridget (1678), painted (and restored in 2018) in exchange for his tomb space, marked by a pavement inscription in the left transept. Don't miss the sacristy with its ceiling fresco from the Giordano school.