Basilica di Sant'Elia, Minor basilica in Castel Sant'Elia, Italy

The Basilica di Sant'Elia is a Romanesque church in Castel Sant'Elia with a nave, two aisles and a raised transept reached by three steps through three arcades. Its 12th-century facade has three portals and hanging little arches, with two rams' heads at the top. The nave columns, with varied Corinthian capitals, were likely taken from Roman buildings.

Anastasius, a notary of the Roman curia, founded a monastery here around 520; it is first recorded in a papyrus of 557 and later cited by Pope Gregory I. In the early 11th century the abbot Elia built the basilica, mentioned by Gregory VII in 1076 and Innocent III in 1211. A tuff boulder fall damaged the left wall in 1607, repaired at the expense of the Farnese, who owned the church from 1540 to 1649. Decline after 1740 ended when Pius IX had Virginio Vespignani restore it.

The apse frescoes, painted around the year 1000 by the brothers Giovanni and Stefano with Giovanni's nephew Niccolò, show the Redeemer flanked by Peter and Paul and two unidentified saints, with twelve lambs below moving toward the Lamb of God. In the lower register a procession of virgins carries crowns for a Madonna now lost; only the archangels Michael and Raphael remain.

The basilica is part of the pontifical sanctuary of Santa Maria "ad rupes"; the crypt holds the tombs of Saint Anastasius and Saint Nonnosus, reached by a straight stair from the right aisle. The raised transept is climbed by three steps, and the Cosmatesque floor lies in the transept and part of the central nave.

The ambo of the former Schola Cantorum carries a lower register with the legendary squaring of the circle, an eight-petalled flower meant to show the earthly element returning to the heavenly through rebirth in baptism. On the side facing the left aisle, a second register dates to the time of Pope Gregory IV.