Church of Our Lady Help of Nice

This guide to the Church of Our Lady Help of Nice follows two obsessive men. Don Bosco, a Turin priest who founded schools for poor and abandoned boys, is the reason this Salesian order built a church here between 1924 and 1933, designed by Jules Febvre and Marius Deporta in reinforced concrete like Auguste Perret's Notre-Dame du Raincy. And Eugene Doucet is the painter who climbed a scaffold above the nave in the 1920s and stayed there, on and off, for over twenty years, painting a Stations of the Cross at full human scale. Look up at his cobalt-and-gold vault, and at Antoine Bessac's twelve narrative stained-glass windows lighting the walls where his scaffold once stood.