Chiesa di San Galla

D(EO) O(PTIMO) M(AXIMO) IN HONOREM S(ANCTAE) GALLAE VID(UAE) - A(NNO) D(OMINI) MCMXL
(IT)

In honour of the Great Ottimo Massimo God, in honour of Saint Galla Widow - in the year of our Lord 1940

(Inscription above the arcade archway)

It was built in 1940 based on a design by architect Tullio Rossi, and was consecrated by Cardinal Ugo Poletti on the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the parish on 15 December 1990.

The church is a parish church, erected on 13 December 1940 by the decree of the Cardinal Vicar Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani Templum in honorem. It has been visited by two popes: Pope Paul VI on 13 March 1966, and Pope John Paul II on 25 January 1981.

From the 14th February 2015, the homonymous cardinal's title has rested on it.

The churchyard is bordered by a travertine colonnade composed of an architrave supported by pillars. At the two side naves, the colonnade has a flat roof. The façade, with a brick wall face, is salient and has, in the centre, a high rectangular niche housing, below, the portal and, higher up, a large window surmounted by the coat of arms of Pope Pius XII. At the nave, the façade ends in a triangular shape and is surmounted by a cross. Two twin portals, each surmounted by a window with a marble Greek cross structure, open each at the side naves.

To the left of the façade rises the bell tower, whose belfry opens with a rectangular window on each of its four sides; inside the latter is a concert of three E3 bronzes, cast in 1940 by the Cobalchini company from Padova. The bell tower ends with a low pyramid roof surmounted by a cross.

Inside, the church has three naves divided by red marble columns with a wooden trussed ceiling. Fourteen colourless windows give light to the liturgical hall, which ends with a semicircular apse. The presbytery, elevated a few steps above the rest of the church, houses the small high altar, consisting of a cippus with reliefs from the Flavian period. The left-hand nave ends with the Chapel of the Santissimo Sacramento, where a wooden tondo depicts the Gospel episode of the Cena di Emmaus.

The church preserves two important works from the ancient church of Santa Galla, demolished in the 1930s for the widening of Via del Teatro Marcello in the Ripa district, including a 17th-century painting depicting the Vision of St. Galla, kept in a chapel at the end of the right aisle.

A memorial stone on the back of the church, near the entrance, recalls the old church of St. Galla and its demolition in 1935, and the construction of the new building and its erection as a Roman parish.

The altar-reliquary, made of white marble, is a funerary altar dating from the height of the Flavian age, reused in the Christian context in the 11th century. It comes from the lost church of Santa Maria del Portico, in which it remained until its demolition in 1932; originally placed in San Giorgio in Velabro, it has been in the church of Santa Galla since 20 September 1988.

The altar consists from a single block of white marble, with a parallelepiped form, resting on a moulded base composed of a straight groove, an inverted groove and a fillet. The upper modelling, arranged along the front and the smaller sides, consists of a fillet, a straight groove, an inverted groove and a group of three diagonally cut laths; the almost square-shaped mensa top has a cavity, crudely made in the Middle Ages for the insertion of relics and protected by a marble cover. On the sides of the altar are three vegetal frames starting from a tuft, located in the centre of the lower band, from which three acanthiform leaves and two stems wind into whorls, sometimes inhabited by birds at rest or in flight and often placed at the upper junction of the shoots. On the front of the altar, a stork with outstretched wings pecks at a bee; on the right side, a sparrow grasps a sapling with its beak; on the left side, a pelican stretches its beak upwards; the back facade houses a majestic laurel tree whose fronds shelter birds in flight or in the act of feeding their young.

Two inscriptions engraved in a triangular groove on the cippus commemorate: the first the consecration of the church of St Mary in Portico by Pope Gregory VII; the second bears the dedication to Jesus and the Virgin Mary, as well as the date of the consecration of the altar (8 July 1073, 11th indition) and the long list of relics preserved in the altar: fragments of the cross of Christ and the sponge, the cross of St Andrew and parts of his bones, and the relics of 21 other martyrs including 6 women.

The apse is entirely occupied by the pipe organ, the work of Bartolomeo Formentelli, who built it in several stages until 2003 from an original 1967 nucleus of his own construction containing material from 19th-century Italian organs.

The instrument is entirely mechanically driven and is enclosed within a wooden case with a special asymmetrical display composed of several fields; it has 94 registers for more than 5,000 pipes. The console is windowed, with four keyboards of 58 notes each and a straight pedalboard of 30 notes; the register controls, consisting of knob pulls or side-sliding knobs, are arranged in several columns to the right and left of the keyboards.