Santissima Annunziata, Baroque church in Via della Madonna, Livorno, Italy.
Santissima Annunziata is a church on Via della Madonna in Livorno, built from 1601 to 1606 to Alessandro Pieroni's design for the Greek Catholic community. Its sober facade, added a century later, has a triangular pediment and two Tuscan columns; two marble statues, Innocence and Meekness, stand on it as fiberglass copies, the originals kept in the vestibule since 2014. Inside is a single rectangular hall with a wooden ceiling rebuilt after the war and a 1610 iconostasis by the Greek master Anthimos Kolas.
Greek sailors serving the Order of Santo Stefano gathered first at the oratory of San Jacopo in Acquaviva outside the walls. In 1601 work began on a national church in via della Madonna, completed in March 1606 to Alessandro Pieroni's design. The facade followed a century later, perhaps by Giovanni Baratta or Giovan Battista Foggini with sculpture by Andrea Vaccà. Bombing destroyed most of the church; in 1951 it passed to the Arciconfraternita della Purificazione.
The church is also called dei Greci Uniti because it belonged to the Greek Catholic community following the Byzantine rite; since 2015 it has been used by the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church. The wooden iconostasis of 1610, carved by the Greek master Anthimos Kolas from Zakynthos, separates the clergy area from the faithful and bears icons of the major Byzantine feasts painted in 1640–43 by an unknown slave from the Bagno of Livorno.
The church stands on Via della Madonna, a few metres from the Tempio di San Gregorio and the Chiesa della Madonna, so the three can be seen on one short walk through the city centre. It has been used by the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church since 2015, so opening depends on that community's services rather than on a fixed tourist timetable.
After World War II destruction, fiberglass replicas of two original statues were reinstalled on the facade in 2012, representing virtues like Innocence. This modern reconstruction reveals how the building has been carefully restored over time.
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