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It is one of the religious buildings the inhabitants of Teramo most hold dear. The community is very fond of it and very involved in the feast day on July 2nd, dedicated to the Madonna delle Grazie, whose miracles are very often connected with popular beliefs and historical events.
The Sanctuary was built before 1156. It was restored towards the end of the 17th century and again in the 19th century. During the 20th century, it was reinforced after the collapse of part of the lodge.
Today it stands completely modernized in its Neo-Renaissance look due to the last rebuilding in 1892-1900, by the architect Cesare Mariani. The facade of the church, made of bricks, displays a central rose window and two rectangular windows on both sides. It is elegantly adorned by a small portico with round arches (surmounted by a tympanum) and three entrance portals. The fresco, portraying the Virgin Mary and the Saints, decorating the lunette of the main portal was attributed to Giacomo from Campli.
The floor plan, a rectangular nave, has three chapels on each side and it ends in an apse. The ceiling is supported by a rib vault and has a hemispherical dome with frescos by Cesare Mariani, dating back to the late 19th century. Inside the church not only will you be struck by the frescos but also by the wooden polychrome statue, which dates back to the 15th century. The statue truly is a masterpiece of local art, credited to Silvestro dell’Aquila. It represents a Madonna delle Grazie who is sitting holding the Holy Child on Hher lap. The detached fresco with the Maestà in a 15th century architectural context with a tympanum is preserved in a side chapel and attributed to Pietro Alemanno. This work of art uses the genre of the sacra conversazione (holy conversation), a depiction of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus on either side. On one side there is a bishop. Who is probably the patron saint of Teramo, saint Berardo and there’s also a saint who’s been identified by scholars as the Bizantine saint Paraskevi of Rome. Local historian Francesco Savini credited it to Carlo Crivelli, an important Venetian, late-Gothic artist, operating in nearby Ascoli Piceno. However, in the Sixties, art critic Ferdinando Bologna identified Pietro Alemanno as its painter. The side chapels hold more recent works by distinguished local artists such as Gennaro Della Monica, Vittorio Scarselli, Giacinto Strappolatini and Pasquale Celommi.
The cloister of the convent is a valuable part of the building, evidence of the ancient medieval building, with stone columns and capitals in the Lombard-Byzantine style, dating back to the 12th century.
The church keeps a considerable number of votive offerings, the oldest ones dating back to the 15th century, including a silver relief with a Nativity scene from 1565, two eighteen-century chalices of Neapolitan manufacture and a remarkable group of sacred vestments made around the and 16th century and first half of the 18th century.
The chronicles report that the church was founded in 819; then had numerous remakes. The portal is in stone ashlars, and the facade has decorations made with cut bricks or geometric shapes rhomboidal brick, a type of decoration that leads back to the decorations of the ancient cathedral of Sancta Maria Aprutiensis. Of the extension of the fourteenth century, with the addition of two naves, remains the right aisle, interrupted by the inclusion of rooms used as sacristy, as well as small chapels, which show sixteenth-century features. There is no trace of the ancient cloister the church had. The building preserves an inlaid tabernacle and 18th-century wooden altars by Giovanni palombieri and his school; also 18th-century paintings are the high altar, which shows on the back more ancient works ascribable to the end of the 16th century. A Madonna and Child by Giacomo da Campli, once belonging to the church, is exhibited in the collections of the Pinacoteca Civica.
The Church is in Largo Proconsole along corso Porta Romana. Its origins are very old, and probably date back to 1200. During the 17th-18th centuries, the church underwent a total baroque makeover and today nearly nothing of the old medieval building is left. The brick facade, has a huge central window crowned with a tympanum, with frames and four pilasters with mirrors inside. The triple tympanum architrave has two side members linked to it by plant motifs and curlicues, while the frame above it has a double Constantinian cross symbolizing the brotherhood that lived into the Church. The facade is split vertically by four framed pilasters, elongated, blind niches, which enliven the structure. The bell tower is one of the most interesting elements. Its rectangular plan, result of various rearrangements undertaken during the Renaissance, as the spire suggests, is divided by a frame in three floors with arches that are blind in the first two sections; the one of the belfry has small holes for the bells. The structure ends with four small corner towers, with a string course frame sail at their centre, overlooked by a smaller sail. Inside the church are three naves; in the central one there’s a dome with a lantern, behind the altar an altarpiece dated 1568 representing the Pentecost. The elliptic dome, visible from the outside, has a decorative group representing the four Cardinal Virtues, the side windows have sumptuously decorated arch frames finished with painted gold. The wonderful organ was made by Vincenzo Paci in 1864, it is above the wooden choir supported by corbels.
The Cathedral of Teramo was commissioned by Bishop Guido II; its construction began in 1158 and was dictated by the need to rebuild the city that had been destroyed and set on fire, including the ancient cathedral of Sancta Maria Aprutiensis. In the fourteenth century the bishop Nicolò degli Arcioni provided for its expansion; other works took place in the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Cathedral was adapted to Baroque forms which a repair intervention in 1932 fortunately eliminated. The 2007 restorations helped to further restore the original features of the building.
The church shows both Romanesque and Gothic stylistic influences and has the particularity of having two opposite facades. The most spectacular one overlooks piazza Orsini and has the characteristic horizontal crowning of most of the churches of Abruzzo; here the horizontal façade is decorated with battlements and interrupted by the slender tympanum which, starting from the central portal, develops in height for the entire façade and beyond, considerably slimming and enlivening the whole. The imposing splayed portal is decorated by a frieze with mosaics welcoming angel musicians and by twisted columns and small columns, supported by two crouching lions.
The other façade, opposite to the main one, overlooks piazza Martiri della Libertà; it is less striking, with a simpler and more linear style. The access door, located at the end of the staircase, is a false door that serves as an embellishment. Since the year 2000, the bronze work performed by Venanzo Crocetti from Giuliese has been inserted inside the light space of the fake passage, which represents the Annunciation.
The interior of the imposing building is marked by three naves with columns and round arches of considerable momentum. The altar displays a work of great value: a silver frontal made up of thirty-five embossed and chiseled gilded silver plates, depicting episodes from the life of Christ, a fifteenth-century work by the engraver Nicola da Guardiagrele. Another great work is the sixteenth-century Polyptych of Sant'Agostino, also from the fifteenth century,
In addition to the undeniable beauty of the church, the bell tower gives prestige to the cathedral, which is one of the best examples of Lombard Gothic existing in Abruzzo . The lower part was built between 1100 and 1200; in the fourteenth century two floors were added; In the fifteenth century the octagonal spire, whose corners are surmounted by cusps or small towers.