The church of Saint Blaise di Anguillara Sabazia has a rustic and austere facade that shows that it has not been finished and a door with a masonry frame. On one side is the parish house.
The church was built after the sack of Rome in 1527 after the destruction of San Nicola. San Biagio became the patron saint of Anguillara Sabazia on April 26, 1834.
The tall and narrow building is covered by a barrel vault and side windows that give it a mystical aspect. It has a single nave, with four chapels and side altars, which ends with an apse and a dome.
The altarpiece dates back to the 16th century and was made by Giovanni Battista Ricci, who also frescoed the church of S. Marcello al Corso in Rome, the Basilica of S. Giovanni and the Scala Santa in Laterano.
Inside you can admire the artistic pictorial decorations made by Torildo Conconi, a well-known Lombard painter, and a wooden sculpture of the Virgin Mary (on a bank of clouds, surrounded by three orphans, who appears to San Girolamo Emiliani) made by the sculptor Santifaller of Ortisei in Val Gardena.
The statue of Saint Blaise of Sebaste, Bishop and Martyr is located in a niche of the apse and is carried on the shoulders in a procession. along the streets of the town and up to the collegiate church, on February 3, the day of the patron saint's day. As a tradition, at the end of the solemn mass there is the rite of the "anointing of the throat" of which San Biagio is the protector.
The machine of the procession is carried on the shoulders by the Archconfraternity of S. Giovanni Decollato and of the SS. Sacramento, born in the mid-fourteenth century, from spontaneous associations of the faithful to help the poorest and assist those sentenced to death.
The Archconfraternity is divided into two branches to pay homage to the Eucharist and Mercy, the Red branch and the Black branch.
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