Salisbury Cathedral was consecrated in 1220 to replace the cathedral in Old Sarum. Today, Salisbury Cathedral, an extraordinary building that remains a leading example of Early English architecture, is the centerpiece of the city. Its central portion of the cathedral took 38 years to complete, from 1220 until 1258. While the structure itself is spectacular, the church is home to one of four surviving original copies of the Magna Carta. A master stonemason present at Runnymede and tasked with distributing copies of the document, Elias of Dereham, brought Salisbury’s version to the cathedral.
The 17th-century Baroque Sant’Agnese in Agone faces Piazza Navona, the location where the Saint Agnes, an early Christian saint, was martyred in the ancient Stadium of Domitian. Pope Innocent X instigated construction of the church, which began in 1652. Architects Girolamo Rainaldi and his son, Carlo Rainaldi, oversaw construction as did architect Francesco Borromini.
Capuchin Crypt
For a uniquely different perspective of the “Eternal City,” head over to the Capuchin Crypt. Located beneath Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, the crypt is home to skeletal remains of thousands of bodies said to be Capuchin friars buried by their order, which adorn the crypt’s walls as a tribute to how swiftly time on Earth passes and humans’ mortality.
Santa Maria Novella dates to the mid 13th century. A pair of Dominican friars, Fra Sisto da Firenze and Fra Ristoro da Campi, designed the church. It is known as Novella, which means “new” because it was built on the site of the 9th-century oratory of Santa Maria delle Vigne. Leon Battista Alberti completed the church’s façade in 1470. Admittedly, it would be nearly impossible to list every church in Florence that is worth seeing, not to mention how dif-ficult it would be to actually visit each church. Certainly the four aforemen-tioned churches offer a nice overview and can easily be seen in a day or two, or spread out over a longer period of time, depending on how long one plans on spending in Florence.
Smyrna First United Methodist Church in downtown Smyrna, Georgia, is one of the oldest institutions in the Jonquil City, dating to about 1838. The current structure dates to June 1967, replacing a five-and-a-half-decade-old structure. In 1911, the church built its first brick structure, an edifice along Atlanta Road.
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Southwark Cathedral, formally The Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie, is an Anglican Cathedral located on the south bank of the River Thames. The cathedral is the mother church of the Anglican Diocese of Southwark, which was created in 1905. The current structure uses the form of a Gothic edifice built between 1220 and 1420. However, the cathedral reconstructed the nave in the late 19th-century.
The St John the Baptist Church in Cardiff, Wales, is a parish church listed as a Grade I building. It is the only church in the city center that dates back to pre-Medieval times and is also the only medieval building apart from Cardiff Castle. The church was constructed in 1180 as a chapel to serve as a smaller place of worship for St Mary’s Church. St Mary’s Church was established by Benedictine monks from Tewkesbury Abbey.
St. Mary of the Angels sits on the site of Wellington’s first Catholic Church, established in 1843, and is the third church to occupy the site. The church opened on March 26, 1922, replacing a building that burned in May 1918. Construction started in April 1919, and the church’s contractor, H.E. Manning, went bankrupt during construction. Father Stanislaw Mahoney, the parish priest, and a close friend, Martin Maloney, worked with a group of largely unskilled workers to complete the church.