Domenico Antonio Vaccaro e l’architettura sacra a Castel di Sangro

The most authoritative studies on the eighteenth-century reconstruction of the church of S. Maria Assunta in Castel di Sangro, first of all that of Damiano Venanzio Fucinese, assigned the architectural aspects of the work to the lombardo Francesco Ferradini, limiting the intervention of Domenico Antonio Vaccaro to the execution of the paintings. Based on the analogies of other churches in which Vaccaro is the protagonist as an architect, as in the case of the SS. Annunziata in Sessa Aurunca, it is possible to hypothesize that the new architecture of the church of Castel di Sangro could also be attributed to the same Vaccaro. In this way his architectural thought would extend from Naples to the Altopiani Maggiori d’Abruzzo. The story of the baroque reconstruction of the collegiata in Castel di Sangro is therefore a further fundamental testimony of the transition of architectural ideas between the center and the periphery of the Neapolitan state, which so far had been limited to the figure of Cosimo Fanzago and which here, instead, involves Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, a leading artist in the capital’s cultural environment, shedding light on a particular aspect of his activity as an architect which has so far remained in the shadows.