Church of Saint Anthony the Abbot

Pleasant, not crowded. Good for praying.

Hello, I would like to know if in this church there is a painting of Camponeschi from the year 1790 and the contact email of this church. Thank you

Catholic Church of the Byzantine-Russian rite. The working hours of the weekdays are variable and are posted in front of the Church, while on Sundays there is always the Divine Liturgy at 10 am, excluding the months of July and August.

Center for the liturgical life of the Russian Catholic Apostolate in the 20th century. Here, under the leadership of the former choir director of the Kiev Cathedral of St. Vladimir, professor of music at the Oriental Institute Fyodor Alekseevich Butkevich (1887-1971), a wonderful choir was formed that performed Russian church music and mastered secular classical and traditional folk singing. Priest Ludwig Pichler succeeded him and was the regent here, who made a huge contribution to the harmonization of Italian translations of liturgical chants of the Russian musical tradition. The theme of Russian pictorial art and iconography is presented by the authors: a graduate of the Imperial Academy of Arts Grigory Pavlovich Maltsev (1881-1953) and a student of I.E. Repin and the world famous Old Believer icon painter and restorer Pimen Maksimovich Sofronov (1898-1973).

The Romanesque rite church has welcomed the Rusa community of Eastern Christian confession since 1930, especially the Rusa community which has chosen the path of the diaspora. Today this church still celebrates the oriental rite in the Slavonic and Italian languages. The church is dedicated to Sant Antonio Abbate who lived in the VIII CENTURY. There are many frescoes that tell of his life and the peculiarity of this church is the impressive number of devils present in the frescoes. In fact, the story of this saint says that he felt surrounded by these "malevolent creatures" who presuaded him to leave his life path dedicated to God. Always around this church there is also the institute of Eastern Christian churches (russicum) which keeps a very important library on Eastern Christian churches with some unique and very ancient texts.

This ancient church is located near the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. It had annexed a hospital, prior to the Church and built in the second half of the 13th century, for the care of the sick from the so-called "St. Anthony's fire". Armellini reports this curiosity about the hospital: "Michele Lonigo tells of a curious privilege that the prior of the hospital enjoyed in the fourteenth century, and which he says he took from an ancient manuscript. He writes, therefore, that that prior attended the pope's lunch in some days, and what was left over from the pontiff's table of bread, wine and any other food and drink, was given as alms to the aforementioned prior, who was deliberately placed in a nearby room. he kept the basket ready to take everything with him to the sick in the hospital. " The church was built in 1308, replacing a pre-existing one called Sant’Andrea cata barbara (from the 5th century); it was then rebuilt in 1481 by Pope Sixtus IV, and underwent further internal restorations in the eighteenth century. The facade instead, the work of Antonio Muñoz, dates back to the restoration work of the church in the first half of the twentieth century (since it had been abandoned after the unification of Italy): the Romanesque portal inserted in the facade is all that remains of the ancient Hospital. The inscription above it recalls the foundation of the hospital commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Capocci. In 1928 the church and its surroundings were purchased by the Holy See; the church was assigned to the Russian Catholics of the Byzantine rite, while the annexed buildings were transformed into the Pontifical Collegio Russicum, a center of Russian and Oriental studies. Today the church is accessed via a double flight of stairs, built after 1870, when huge earthworks led to the lowering of the level of via Carlo Alberto. Before, the church overlooked a large square, where the customary and famous blessing of animals took place on 17 January, the day of the feast of St. Anthony.