The church of St. Francis of Paola belongs to the Franciscan Order of Minims, who arrived in Sardinia from 1625.
The church building must have been built around the middle of the seventeenth century and took on the simple architectural forms that characterized Cagliari churches of that period. The old facade was adorned with the curvilinear finial characteristic of 18th-century churches in Sardinia, which in Cagliari, in the first half of the century, found comparisons in the facades of the churches of SS. Giorgio and Caterina dei Genovesi and Santa Restituta. The new facade, with a classical flavor, by engineer Tommaso Ferraro, was built to include the church in the continuous line of the facades of the porticoed buildings that now characterized Via Roma and was inaugurated in 1932.
The interior consists of a wide nave, with three chapels distributed on the two long sides, and a barrel-vaulted roof. The deep rectangular chancel is a little raised above the level of the church; it is accessed by a short flight of steps marked by marble balustrades like those in the presbytery enclosure.
The high altar is one of the most beautiful of those in Cagliari because of its polychrome marbles. and for the vertical momentum characteristic of late 18th-century altars: in fact, it is the masterpiece of G. Battista Spazzi, who would have made it in 1972. In the niche is a statue of the order’s saint, St. Francis of Paola, perhaps of Neapolitan origin. The altars in the chapels are chronologically and stylistically different, housing sculptures and paintings of varying value. One may briefly mention the Purgatory Altarpiece by Pantaleone Calvo of Genoa, datable to 1664, as well as the carved and polychrome wooden altarpiece containing it.
