St. Valentine's Church

Designed in 1979 by architect Francesco Berarducci (1924-1992)

The modern church of San Valentino is the parish of the Olympic Village and is located in Viale della XVII Olimpiade between Via Belgio and Via Germania, a few metres from the Corso Francia viaduct.

The modern church of the Olympic Village is dedicated to Saint Valentine, a martyr buried in the catacombs of the same name nearby (catacombs of Saint Valentine). In the first centuries of the Christian era, after the Edict of Constantine, the cult of the martyr was very strong; the Parioli hill overlooking the Tiber where the catacombs were dug was called Monte San Valentino and the Porta del Popolo was called Porta San Valentino.
The load-bearing structure of the church is made of exposed bricks, both on the outside and inside, punctuated by bands and travertine head blocks. The result is an image of a building apparently older than the rest of the neighborhood, almost a ruin and brought back to life.

The Church of San Valentino was not part of the initial design of the Olympic Village in 1960. The construction site opened only in 1983 and, by express will of the citizens, it was not built on the lot envisaged in the original plan of the complex which wanted it located at the end of Viale della XVII Olimpiade, in the centre of the Village.

This church, although not fully embracing some of the peculiarities of the Olympic Village, such as the visual and functional permeability of the ground floor through the use of pilotis, maintains a strong link with the Village. The building takes on the relationship between internal and external spaces and the human-scale dimension of the neighborhood in which it is located. The church can also be considered a laboratory for testing the idea of a new city, a lower city, exclusively pedestrian, where even the bell tower of the church is commensurate with the size of the pedestrian. A series of openings, both in the perimeter fence and in the shell of the church, allow you to look outside and at the same time be observed as in a glass house.

In 1979, Francesco Berarducci (1924-1992), the architect who designed, among other things, the RAI headquarters in Viale Mazzini and the RAI Production Center in Via Teulada, was entrusted with the realization of the project. The choice fell on this architect because in the past he had been responsible for reporting the building activities of the Pontifical Work in Rome and, studying the parishes built in the twentieth century, had highlighted non-homogeneous design approaches to the surrounding buildings and had affirmed the need to return to a language of form that emphasizes spiritual serenity. Berarducci's reference model is no longer the Roman architecture of marble and stucco, but the romantic architecture of the ruins of monuments.

The church is designed by superimposing beams and glass windows on brick walls that give light and lightness to the entire construction. The low height of the building and the brick walls communicate with the rest of the Village. The church looks like an archaeological excavation and evokes the relationship between ancient and modern, as also evidenced by the silhouette of one of the angels of Ponte Sant'Angelo placed at the entrance. The designer also creates the equipment and liturgical symbols of the church.

The planimetric-volumetric system is based on a cubic module measuring 2,20 m on each side with a complex articulation which, in the altimetric variety of the walls, aims to suggest the open, unfinished or partially demolished character of the construction and develops along an internal path, one module wide, which longitudinally crosses the interior complex.

The path, which forms the lateral nave of the church to the west, is flanked by a two-story high and two-module wide body containing cellular spaces and service areas, while to the east it connects a succession of five enclosures alternating between open and covered: the entrance courtyard, the church hall, the void that divides the latter from the rectory, the rectory itself and the large void for children's play. You have to pass through the church to access the other areas.

Characteristic is a small cloister, full of orange trees, from which stairs lead to the priests' homes. In addition to the liturgical rooms, the complex includes a series of classrooms and a large underground equipped room.

The church hall is crossed by a main luminous path in the roof, which leads the faithful from the door towards the altar. The floor of the church and the churchyard is made of peperino slabs interspersed with travertine elements and is crossed by a processional band decorated in various ways that reaches the altar from the outside.

Text source: Roma2pass where the contents are owned by the Association AMUSE Friends of the Second Municipality and are distributed under license Creative Commons Attribution - 4.0 International - Noncommercial - Share Alike.