The Church of Saints Severus and Carlo Borromeo in Barcelona, was built by the Lazarist Fathers between 1710 and 1746,
within the walls of their home, and was the first founded by the Congregation of the Mission in the Kingdom of Spain. Of the
convent complex, demolished in 1942, today only the Church remains, which stands out among the Catalan architecture for
the design solutions that were adopted. The essay highlights these distinctive features of the building and points out how the
centralised spatiality of the presbytery is reminiscent of 17th century Italian architecture, particularly that of Milan and Liguria.
These influences may depend on the fact that from an administrative point of view the Church belonged to the Italian Province
of the Lazarists, governed by Father Bernardo Della Torre (1678-1749) between the 1720s and 1740s; he also acted as architect
for his order. In this essay we present the reasons why the Barcelona church can be attributed to him, based on several historical
facts and, above all, on the unquestionable affinities between his Italian works and the building in question.
On the one hand, this
hypothesis resolves one of the criticalities in the history of Catalan architecture, and on the other, it would add another piece to
the long series of architectural models that were brought into Spain from Italy, and then adapted to meet local needs and tastes.
