Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at the Roman Forum

The Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at the Roman Forum is a Catholic place of worship in the historic center of Rome, located in the Campitelli district in the square of the same name, near the Roman Forum and at the foot of the Tarpeian cliff; it falls within the territory of the parish of Santa Maria in Portico in Campitelli and is a rectory entrusted to the order of the Capuchin friars minor.

About the origins of this church and its name, this is how Armellini reports:

"On that road corresponding to the ancient vico iugario there were the grains of the Roman patrician Mattei. In the portico of those there was an image of the s. Virgin [3], to whom recommending a pious mother whose innocent son had been imprisoned and sentenced to death for evil deeds, the Virgin told him, consoling her, that her son would not die, but miraculously saved from the gallows. After that, the faithful often offered gifts to this image and the care was given to the brotherhood of S. Maria in Portico. Near those granaries there was also a small hospital, near which the church of the Virgin of Consolation was later built. These events happened just before 1460 "

(Armellini, op. Cit., P. 536.)

The church, therefore, built in the second half of the fifteenth century and dedicated on November 3, 1470, was called "of the consolation" to console the condemned to death, whose sentences were carried out until 1550 in the nearby Rupe Tarpea; it was internally adorned with paintings by Antoniazzo Romano and flanked, in 1475, by a hospital entrusted to the lay brotherhood of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Map: Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at the Roman Forum