Santa Maria del Pianto, Rome

This fairly unknown church was designed and built in 1612 by Sebregondi over an earlier church in front of which, in 1546, the Virgin Mary miraculously appeared crying on the scene of a cruel crime. The event is commemorated in a fresco, the Madonna of the Lament, over the high altar. There is also the painting of the Miracle of the Weeping Madonna opposite the organ on one of the two sides of the altarpiece. Entrance to the church in the shape of a Greek cross is from either of two side roads, Via del Pianto and Via Santa Maria dei Calderari, and not from the main façade, which was never completed. The main façade faces Piazza Giudìa in the district known as the Ghetto where the Jews were required to live during the 16th-19th Centuries.

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