The church building

The numerous transformations that affected the complex over the centuries do not make reading of it easy, except as regards the church, which, although deprived of a large part of the roof and having undergone substantial changes, still shows its distinctive characteristics.
The church has a longitudinal Latin cross plan, characterized by a nave without side aisles, a very big one, flanked by four deep chapels on both sides. Passage from the central space of the nave to the chapels is through robust centric arcades, originally ogival. The present-day perception of the space of the church is distorted by the demolition of the dividing septa of the chapels – except for one – which creates the illusion of two continuous longitudinal spaces on the two sides of the nave. The covering of the latter was constituted by a wooden truss roof, today no longer extant, while the lateral spaces are covered by ribbed cross vaults with hanging crowns. Next to the nave there is a big square chancel with a width equal to that of the nave, defined vertically by four imposing ogival arches imposted on four big square pillars. The covering of this space was a wooden truss roof, known through nineteenth-century images. This space is flanked by two side arms that are characterized, instead, by a covering with barrel vaults. There follows the presbytery, covered by a ribbed cross vault with a hanging crown, also dilated into two lateral spaces covered by barrel vaults. The spatial layout ends with a polygonal apse, illuminated by a single-light window placed close to the centre of the back wall, a twin of the one existing on the west front. The covering of the apse is constituted by a stellar vault whose groins, converging in an elegantly carved gutta crown, are joined to the impost by a cylindrical baton that goes down on the wall and ends at the base with a cornice. The carved decoration motifs, present at the base of the pilasters and the corner batons, are typical of the Iberian area, like the ornamental motif of the double opposed gutta engraved on the hanging crown of the vault over the chancel, symbolising, according to some interpretations, the eternal struggle between good and evil. The inside spatiality appears simple but at the same time imposing and, because of this characteristic, the church has often been compared to expressions typical of the northern Gothic. As regards the external configuration, the façade is characterized by the juxtaposition of different volumetries: a low building, with two chapels that flank a pronaos and the space corresponding to the nave, which rises very high. The external portico on the west side presents a big depressed arch, in accordance with a typology that recalls the church of the Olivetan order in Naples. Of the original coverings that characterized the projection, only the north chapel maintains the vault intact: a hemispherical dome imposted on an octagonal drum, with semi-cylindrical niches at the corners, crowned by corners with brackets. The space in front of the portico is delimited, on the south side, by a wall for containment of an embankment, while nothing remains of the forecourt that was originally in front of the church.