The 'blue' Cristallini Church, closed since the 80s, reopens today in Naples' Sanità district and is being reopened for worship and social inclusion.
The restoration and reopening are part of the “Luce al Rione Sanità” project, launched in 2021 by the Cooperativa La Paranza and financed by the Fondazione con il Sud and the Fondazione di Comunità San Gennaro together with Intesa Sanpaolo.
But the project, explain the creators, also intervenes on some assets of the Pnrr: the fight against inequalities, the job placement of young people, urban regeneration, the valorization of cultural assets with the contribution of the Third Sector
. The church of Santa Maria Maddalena ai Cristallini stands on via dei Cristallini, a dark little street that was once a ghetto in the Sanità district: the place where the Camorra detonated a car bomb in 1998, causing twenty injuries. Now, with the reopening of the church, “everything will be different,” it is assured.
The project, over the last two years, has seen the activation of artistic workshops aimed at 60 young people, aged 16 to 25. During one of the training courses, the young people of the neighborhood painted, with about twenty shades of blue, the interior of the church together with the artists Tono Cruz, from Gran Canaria, the Chilean Mono González and Giuliana Conte, Italian, who created the portraits waving along the nave.
In the church, the Casa dello Spirito e delle Arti Foundation shared a gift from Ennio Morricone who in 2013, after the shipwreck of Lampedusa in which at least 386 migrants died, composed “La voce dei sommersi”, a score that combines the threatening noises of the waves with Morricone’s own voice identifying with a migrant.
The current altar of the church was instead made by the inmates of the carpentry/luthiery workshop of the Secondigliano prison with the bow of one of the migrants' boats.
“Cult and culture are a combination that takes shape in Sanità, in this church, which is a 'home' that responds to the need for community and education,” says the parish priest Don Luigi Calemme. A confirmation of how this neighborhood is capable of transforming closed and abandoned spaces into tools for change and innovation.
EDITORIAL TEAM
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