St. Aloysius Chapel

St. Aloysius Chapel belongs to St. Aloysius College in Mangaluru and stands on Lighthouse Hill in the middle of the city. Italian Jesuits of the Mangalore Mission put up the college and chapel in the early 1880s, and in 1899 the Italian Jesuit Antonio Moscheni painted the interior. His work covers almost every wall, which is unusual for a chapel in India, and mixes frescoes on wet lime plaster with paintings on canvas.

A central band on the ceiling follows Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron, from a childhood vow in Florence to nursing plague victims in Rome, where he caught the disease and died at 23. Sloping panels show the Apostles among life-size angels holding garlands, no two with the same flowers, and the arches carry saints of the Church and Jesuit saints, St Thomas among them with a spear. Scenes from the life of Jesus fill other walls; Jesus as the friend of children, on the rear wall, is counted Moscheni's masterpiece.