Church of the New Jesus

This guide to the Church of the New Jesus in Naples starts with a ceiling no one alive has seen: the sky and saints Giovanni Lanfranco painted across the dome in 1634, destroyed by an earthquake in 1688 and repainted, then partly collapsed again in 1774. It traces the building's earlier life as a fifteenth-century palace for Roberto Sanseverino, prince of Salerno, whose diamond-cut volcanic stone facade survived when Jesuits took over the confiscated shell. You'll hear the competing theories for odd marks scratched into that stone facade, from alchemists' signs to a stonecutter's tally. Look up at the shallow false dome overhead, built to trick the eye into thinking it soars higher than it does.