Chiesa di San Roberto Bellarmino

The Church of St. Robert Bellarmine was built to a design by Clemente Busiri Vici between 1931 and 1933; it was consecrated on 20 May 1959, although it had already been inaugurated and opened for worship on 10 June 1933. The place of worship was named after the 17th-century saint, Roberto Bellarmino, one of the leading theologians of the Counter-Reformation, canonised a few years before the church was built, in 1930, and a member of the Society of Jesus.The church is a parish seat, established on 13 May 1933 by Pope Pius XI with the apostolic constitution Quae maiori religionis[5] and entrusted to the Jesuits, who were succeeded by the diocesan clergy in 2003. Since 1969 the cardinal title of St. Robert Bellarmine has insisted on the church. On 13 March 2013 the titular cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope with the name Francis.On 2 March 1980, the second Sunday of Lent, the church was visited by Pope John Paul II.The church of San Roberto Bellarmino is in the rationalist style and is characterised by the octagon as a recurring motif throughout the building.The exterior of the building, entirely with an exposed brick wall face, is characterised by the façade, preceded by a large parvis. The gabled façade has a portico with rectangular parallelepiped pillars in the lower part, while in the upper part there is a triple octagonal window with a polychrome stained-glass window depicting St. Robert Bellarmine. At the top is the marble coat of arms of Pope Pius XI, under whose pontificate the church was erected. On either side of the façade are the two bell towers, also octagonal in base, which house a concert of six bells in the diatonic scale of D#3, made in the 1940s by the Paduan firm Cobalchini.The interior of the church has a Latin cross plan, with little light and characterised by angular shapes due to the reinforced concrete load-bearing structures intentionally left exposed; along the nave, which is a single nave covered with wooden trusses, there are five chapels on each side, each of which is surmounted by an octagonal window with polychrome stained glass, similar to that on the façade and like this one the work of Alessandra Busiri; the cycle is centred on the life of the saint to whom the church is dedicated.The choir head revolves around a central square, forming the cross vault and covered with an octagonal tiburium, along which the two arms of the transept open up, both formed by a half-octagon, with the altars of the Sacred Heart (in the left transept, where the daily celebrations take place) and of the Madonna (in the right transept); in axis with the nave is the main apse, with seven sides, which, like the rest of the transept, is decorated with mosaics by Renato Tomassi, created on a blue background: in the apse is St. Robert Bellarmine, and in the transept the Four Evangelists in the spandrels and the Glorious Cross above the apsidal arch. The original high altar, donated by Beniamino Gigli, is currently unused, as a new presbytery, in a more forward position, was built for the Jubilee Year 2000.On the two choir lofts on either side of the chancel is the Tamburini pipe organ opus 175, built in 1934 and restored several times, the last one by Carlo Soracco in 2009-2010.
The instrument has an electric transmission and its console is located under the left choir loft, on the floor, near the presbytery; the latter has two keyboards of 61 notes each and a concave-radial pedalboard of 32 notes, with the controls of the registers, unions and couplings operated by tongue plates placed on a single row above the second manual.