Thesis title: GAETA NELL’ETÀ MODERNA. IL PALINSESTO DELL’ARCHITETTURA SACRA AI CONFINI SETTENTRIONALI DEL REGNO DI NAPOLI
Religious architecture is not merely a space devoted to worship, but a complex language through which power relations, aesthetic transformations, and cultural dynamics are expressed. This study examines this phenomenon within the context of Gaeta, a city that, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, stood out as a crossroads of artistic and architectural influences from both Central and Southern Italy.
Through a comparative and multiscalar approach, grounded in bibliographic analysis, archival research, and architectural survey, the research aims to fill historiographical gaps and offer a critical reinterpretation of Gaeta’s sacred heritage, placing it in dialogue with civil and military architecture.
The selected case studies – including the Santissima Annunziata, the Succorpo di Sant’Erasmo, and Santa Maria della Sorresca – are interpreted as architectural palimpsests in which medieval structures intertwine with Renaissance and Baroque transformations. The investigation highlights the close osmosis between the spiritual and the secular spheres, as well as the role of the civic university and the forms of lay patronage that influenced local building practices.
The result is the portrait of a city where architecture becomes an expression of the community, a synthesis of memory and innovation, of civic and religious power. Gaeta thus emerges as an active node within the network of cultural centers of the Kingdom of Naples, capable of absorbing, adapting, and reinterpreting artistic models, shaping an original and self-aware architectural identity.