Ireland - Sant’Isidoro a Capo le Case

In 1621, some Franciscans of Spanish origin acquired the land where the church stands today, in order to begin the construction of a holy place dedicated to Saint Isidore, the peasant saint of Madrid,  the following year canonised by Pope Gregory XV. Three years later, however, the church had still not been completed, and so Luke Wadding and his Irish Franciscan companions, who had fled their native country after the Elizabethan conquest, bought and transformed the neighbouring buildings into a college which, to this day, is managed by the community. For this reason, the church very soon became the national church of the Irish in Rome.