San Francesco a Ripa
Bernini’s most tender masterpiece, hidden at the southern edge of Trastevere.
If you walk from The Rabbit Hole down towards Porta Portese, you’ll pass a plain-looking church that most visitors don’t even glance at. Step inside and you will find, in a small chapel on the left, one of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s final and most extraordinary sculptures — a work almost unknown to tourists, and almost always seen in complete silence.
Where Saint Francis slept in Rome
The name tells the story. This is the church “of Saint Francis at the Ripa” — the Ripa Grande being the ancient river port of Rome, where cargo travelling up the Tiber was unloaded. In 1219, Francis of Assisi came to Rome to seek papal approval for his new order, and stayed in the small hospice of San Biagio attached to the Benedictine monastery on this spot.
His cell, with the stone he used as a pillow and the wooden crucifix he prayed before, is preserved above the sacristy and can still be visited on request. There are very few places in Rome where you can stand exactly where a saint once slept — this is one of them.
The church itself was rebuilt in the 17th century and later completed by Mattia de Rossi, a pupil of Bernini. What draws the few who make the pilgrimage here, however, is what waits in the last chapel on the left.
The Beata Ludovica Albertoni
Ludovica Albertoni was a Roman noblewoman who, widowed young, gave away her fortune to the poor of Trastevere and died in mystical ecstasy in 1533. She was beatified in 1671, and her descendant Cardinal Paluzzo Altieri commissioned the elderly Gian Lorenzo Bernini — then in his late seventies — to sculpt her memorial.
The result, completed between 1671 and 1674, is one of the sculptor’s very last works and, to many, his most daring.
She reclines on a marble bed, one hand at her breast and the other clutching the folds of her dress, her head thrown back, her lips parted. The moment Bernini chose is neither her death nor a simple prayer: it is the instant when the divine breaks through the body. Everything — the crumpled sheets, the parted lips, the hand on the heart — trembles with it.
Bernini treated the whole chapel as a single stage. Hidden windows above throw natural light down onto the marble from an unseen source, so that Ludovica appears to glow from within. On a bright day around midday, the effect is almost unbearable.
Where the more famous Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria overwhelms with theatrical grandeur, the Ludovica whispers. She is smaller, more intimate, and — because so few come to see her — she is almost always yours alone.
Also in the church
- The cell of Saint Francis — accessible on request through the sacristy.
- Paintings by Simon Vouet, Martino de’ Rossi and the school of Annibale Carracci — quiet good works you can look at without a queue.
- The Rospigliosi and Paluzzi tombs, elegant examples of Roman Baroque funerary art.
Practical information
- Where: Piazza di San Francesco d’Assisi 88, at the southern edge of Trastevere, a short walk from The Rabbit Hole through the quietest alleys of the quarter.
- Entry: Free.
- Opening hours: Every day, morning and late afternoon (closed around midday — check on arrival).
- Cell of Saint Francis: Ask the sacristan; access depends on availability.
A Trastevere art walk we suggest to The Rabbit Hole’s guests
Leave The Rabbit Hole in the late morning and walk down to San Francesco a Ripa. Spend twenty silent minutes with Bernini’s Ludovica. Then wander back up through the alleys to Santa Cecilia in Trastevere for Maderno’s sculpture and Cavallini’s Last Judgement in the cloistered choir. Finish at Santa Maria in Trastevere in the golden afternoon light, with the apse mosaic and the second Cavallini cycle glowing above the altar.
Three churches, three masterpieces, no queues, no tickets — the Trastevere very few visitors ever see. 🌿🕊️✨
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