Chiesa di San Sebastiano, Livorno

Nice smaller Catholic church.

This vote is the result only of a personal judgment on the architecture of the place and not on the parish that manages the church. The church of San Sebastiano is entrusted to the Order of the Barnabites (i.e. the regular clerics of San Paolo are a male religious institute of pontifical right). After the plague epidemic of 1632 they were entrusted with a new church dedicated to St. Sebastian, protector of the plague victims. The church, designed by Giovanni Francesco Cantagallina, was consecrated on August 16, 1633. The church of San Sebastiano has a very simple external architecture, with a facade adorned only by two large statues of Santo Stefano and San Lorenzo. The interior, with a rectangular plan, consists of a single nave with Baroque ornaments, on which some side chapels open. The main altar dominates everything, framed by elegant marble columns that support the semicircular frames on which the statues of Faith and Charity rest. In the presbytery there are two paintings by Giorgio Vasari depicting the Holy Apostles Matthew and John which were originally placed in the Vatican together with another panel now preserved in the church of Santa Caterina. In the sacristy you can admire the statue of San Sebastiano, a work of the Florentine sixteenth century and donated to the church at the time of its foundation to settle a dispute with the Order of Sant'Agostino, which in the church of San Giovanni Battista kept a fifteenth-century statue of the same saint initially claimed by the Barnabites. The aforementioned chapel of the Madonna di Loreto is a faithful copy of the one present in Loreto and has existed for more than three centuries. Here, on the annual feast of December 10, the faithful flock to venerate the Black Madonna, whose ebony statue is placed on the high altar.