Chiesa di Santa Galla

Cardinal Vicar Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani erected the parish on 13 December 1940 by the decree Templum in honorem, and Cardinal Ugo Poletti consecrated the church on 15 December 1990, the parish's fiftieth anniversary; Paul VI visited on 13 March 1966 and John Paul II on 25 January 1981. The church keeps works from the old church of Santa Galla, demolished in 1935 for the widening of via del Teatro Marcello. Its altar is a white marble funerary altar of full Flavian date, reused as a Christian reliquary in the 11th century; it came from Santa Maria in Portico, demolished in 1932, stood briefly in San Giorgio in Velabro, and has been here since 20 September 1988. Two incised inscriptions on it record Gregory VII's consecration of Santa Maria in Portico and the altar's own consecration on 8 July 1073, listing relics of the True Cross and of the sponge, of the cross of St Andrew and parts of his bones, and of 21 other martyrs, six of them women; its four carved fronts show a stork pecking a bee, a sparrow with a shoot, a pelican, and a laurel tree with birds. The organ by Bartolomeo Formentelli was developed to 2003 from a core of 1967: fully mechanical, 94 stops and more than 5,000 pipes, with four manuals of 58 notes and a pedalboard of 30.