Igreja dos Clérigos

When three brotherhoods of impoverished priests merged into one in 1707, it would be another twenty-four years before they turned to an Italian painter-turned-architect who’d never built a church before. Nicolau Nasoni’s Igreja dos Clérigos became his masterwork, and his final resting place. He joined the brotherhood himself and requested burial here; centuries later, restorers discovered a crypt that may contain his grave, hidden beneath the Baroque landmark that defined northern Portugal’s architectural identity.

Before Porto, Nasoni had painted ceilings in Siena, frescoed a Grand Master’s palace in Malta, and touched up a ceremonial catafalque for the Medici, respectable work for a man with no particular reputation for laying stone. He arrived in Porto in 1725 to redecorate the cathedral and might have stayed a painter indefinitely had the godfather of his own son not happened to be a well-connected nobleman who put his name forward for the Clérigos commission in 1731. The gamble paid off slowly: the church was functioning by 1748, but the tower kept climbing for another fifteen years, finally topping out in 1763 as the tallest structure in Portugal and a landmark sailors used to find their way up the Douro. Nasoni spent the rest of his life giving Porto a face, then asked to be tucked quietly into its foundations without so much as a headstone to mark the spot.