Basilica di Santa Maria di Collemaggio

Santa Maria di Collemaggio is a Romanesque-early Gothic basilica set in a park on the southeastern edge of L'Aquila, immediately recognizable by its extraordinary west facade of interlocking red and white stone in an ornamental checkerboard pattern. The church was founded in 1289 by Pietro da Morrone, a hermit monk who was then elected Pope Celestine V — the only pope in history to voluntarily abdicate, an act Dante condemned in the Inferno as 'the great refusal.' His tomb remains inside the basilica. The church was severely damaged in the 2009 earthquake that devastated L'Aquila and underwent years of painstaking restoration before reopening; the cloister of the former Celestine monastery, still partly standing beside the church, gives a sense of the broader monastic complex that once surrounded it.