The Basilica of San Francesco di Paola, in Naples, has a very curious history: it is the fulfillment of a prophecy made by San Francesco di Paola while he was still alive. The Calabrian saint when he was a guest of the convent of San Giovanni in Lampades, which occupied a large part of the space where the basilica is located today, would have announced to
Ferrante d’Aragona, well 4 centuries in advance, that in that place a church would be built one day and that the open space, on which many convents and monasteries overlooked, would become the largest and most important in the city: today, in fact , here is Piazza del Plebiscito.
And just 4 centuries later, in 1816, King Ferdinand I, to propitiate the reconquest of the precipitously abandoned throne, commissioned the construction of the imposing basilica as the dissolution of the vow made to San Francesco di Paola.
