Church of the Purgatory
MUDIA
Purgatory Church - Museum Of Sacred Art MUDIA
We are located at Largo Purgatorio, close to the walled city that once defined the Arab fortified context built after 827. On this widening, accessed from Corso Umberto I, Sambuca's main artery, overlooks the church built in 1631 and today dedicated to the "Anime Sante del Purgatorio." It was founded in the first half of the 17th century by priest Don Giuseppe Cicio under the name Miserimini Cappuccinelli and originally dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi. The prelate bequeathed it some annuities and a latifundium for the celebration of masses and legati di maritaggio (as the dowry was called to facilitate marriages - or marriages - of orphan girls). In 1632, by a bull issued by Bishop Gualtierio, bishop of Girgenti (the name of ancient Agrigento), a first confraternity was annexed to it, to which, in the same year, the numerous and well-organized Archconfraternity of the Good Death of the City of Rome was added by papal bull.
An understated building with a special bell tower
The church, in continuous load-bearing masonry, is made of squared ashlars of sandstone quarried in situ or in sack masonry, partly facing. In the simple geometry of its elevation, concluded by a horizontally laid cornice, the expositions of the central doorway and wide window stand out; cantonals, string-course band and plinth give it quality, order and proportion. The building has a pitched exterior roof that conceals the church's interior vaulted roof. To the right of the elevation rises the bell tower, probably predating the seventeenth-century church plan: supporting this hypothesis is the spiral staircase of Iberian tradition, called "open-eye" or "with central void," characterized by the "riser-pedestal" monolith system in sandstone; Spanish treatise on the sixteenth century would call it a "Caracol de Mallorca" (a type that appears from the first half of the 1400s, but which would characterize many towns in Sicily in the eighteenth century, after post-earthquake reconstruction: in Sambuca it is also found in the tower of the Church of St. Michael the Archangel and in the Mother Church, which stands on the site of the Arab castle of Zabuth). Some historians believe instead that it is an outpost tower of the castle.
The 18th century in an interior: from the majolica floor of Burgio to the prodigious stuccoes to the paintings of Fra' Felice
Passing through the central doorway, one enters the large church hall, with a single nave and longitudinal development, covered with a barrel vault and paved with fine eighteenth-century majolica tiles from Burgio, with star and floral motifs. Above the entrance is the chancel, supported by a wide segmental arch: it is accessed by the same coclid staircase that leads to the bell tower. Along the nave, punctuated by pilasters surmounted by capitals, two small altars are carved into the thickness of the wall: flanked by two stucco medallions from which purgatory Souls emerge, they are dedicated respectively to St. Francis of Assisi (the one on the right) and to the Holy Crucifix (on the left). At the triumphal arch, a step separates the nave from the wide chancel, which has an almost square plan and, in the center, the marble high altar, detached from the wall with pleasing bas-reliefs. On the face of the triumphal arch are stucco cherubs, linked to each other by a garland of flowers and fruit: they frame the central pelican in gilded stucco, which carries a cherub on its back. In the chancel, two phytomorphic decorations are interspersed in the antependium scenes and "The Perennial Eucharistic Sacrifice": a high relief with the Holy Souls of Purgatory saved by the Eucharistic Sacrifice. On the apse wall, on the other hand, the decorative stucco apparatus is articulated with a cornice, entablature, broken triangular tympanum with large volutes and, in the center, the Eternal Father among putti and allegorical figures. The work harks back to the stucco architecture in use in Sicily in the 18th century and traced to the works of Giacomo Serpotta: it was at his school that the Messina family, authors of the Sambucese stuccoes, were trained. The large altarpiece, depicting Purgatory and the Purification of Souls, was painted in 1783 by Fra' Felice da Sambuca, a Capuchin painter whose works are also found in the Vatican. Placed until the '68 earthquake on the high altar, it was then kept at the local Cooperative Credit Bank, which in the past had promoted its restoration. The Purgatory Church holds the only canvas signed by Fra' Felice and produced exclusively by the artist friar (who, instead, usually reproduced copies at the request of a client).
An exhibition hub, part of the widespread museum of the diocese of Agrigento
The birth of the Sambuca exhibition center was promoted by the Archdiocese of Agrigento and the ecclesial community and carried out in collaboration with the Municipality of Sambuca di Sicilia and the Agrigento Superintendency. An itinerary among artistic treasures and testimonies of Faith aimed, in particular, at the ideal reconstruction of a partially lost heritage and urban image, through the exhibition of the artistic testimonies still present inside the seventeenth-century Church of Purgatory: this one, closed following the earthquake that devastated the Belice Valley on the night of January 15, 1968 and set up as a new museum of Sacred Art, represents a sign of urban regeneration, art, memory and sustainability in the territory.
From the nineteenth-century restorations to the '68 earthquake to the new restoration and the Museum of Sacred Art
The church was entirely restored in the 19th century. The rectors, Don Giovanni Lo Monaco and Don Vito D'Anna, promoted the decorative realization of the presbytery, with geometric motifs and faux-marble decorations within string-course bands, and adjustments to the interior of the church. The building, damaged by the earthquake of '68 that struck the entire Belice Valley, was entirely consolidated in 1996 - together with the former Oratory of the Confraternity attached to the church and placed to follow the sacristy - and partially restored thanks to a grant obtained from the Superintendence of BB.CC.AA. of Agrigento. The conservative restoration work has restored the building from dampness, preserving its plasters; allowed the repaving of the nave and chancel, enhancing the ancient Sicilian eighteenth-century majolica floor, previously recovered; carried out the cleaning of the stucco on the walls of the nave and marble altars, reconfiguring the missing parts; and adjusted the systems. The 2015 liturgical adjustment then dates back to the ambo and altar (a cubic block with columns on either side, supporting the horizontal plane), both made of wood. Since 2018, it has housed the Mu.Di.A., one of the exhibition hubs of the Diocese of Agrigento's Diffuse Museum.
The layout and the tour route. Between art treasures and faith
The setting up of the Sambucese Museum of Sacred Art in the Church of Purgatory provided simple architectural wings and showcases that leave the perception of the original spaces intact, harmonizing and integrating museographic and museological needs with the historical values of the exhibition site. The visit itinerary is divided into a succession of thematic rooms that house works of valuable artistic value from the churches affected by the Belìce earthquake-such as the Mother Church, the College of Mary (Former Convent of St. Augustine), the Benedictine Complex of St. Catherine, the Convent of the Carmine, the Church of the Conception and the Hospital, which were among the most damaged factories of historical and artistic interest. Through the display of the artistic testimonies still present, the Sambucese Exhibition Center aims to ideally reconstruct a partially lost heritage and urban image. A different historical itinerary is reserved for the church of San Giorgio, demolished in 1959, before the earthquake devastated the Valley. The museum itinerary is developed within 4 rooms with an organized thematic route that begins with a topographical framing of the sites involved. It then leads to the Feliciana room, set up inside the church, dedicated to the life of the Capuchin friar Fra Felice and his pictorial art through the display of his most representative paintings, and the space designated for wooden sculpture. Inside the church, a small space is devoted to the most representative works of the Church of St. Catherine, linked to names of influential and representative artists of the local Late Renaissance, such as Fra Innocenzo da Petralia and the sculptors of the Lo Cascio family of Chiusa Sclafani. Next, in the adjoining rooms, is the Planeta Room, with relics belonging to Msgr. Diego Planeta, the last Judge of the Apostolic Legation and Archbishop of Brindisi: it holds the liturgical vestments that belonged to him and a historical reconstruction of the Papal Legate, which came into being following the Norman domination and was in force until the first half of the 19th century (the papal legate, or "Legate of the Roman Pontiff," is an envoy of the pope, his stable representative to local churches or to state authorities or ecclesiastical institutions). The Hall of Vestments and Liturgical Supplements displays silver vessels and furnishings and sacred vestments, most likely made in the two Sambucese cenobia: the Benedictine Monastery and the College of Mary. Finally, the hall dedicated to St. George, a tribute to Sambuca's first patron saint, is also the hall of recovered memory. It preserves, in fact, what was wrested from the demolition of the church of the same name in 1959, before the earthquake devastated the Valley: among its most significant works on display today are a silver reliquary half-bust of the saint, two late 16th-century wooden statues, a painting depicting "The Four Crowned Martyrs Saints" attributed to Pietro Novelli and a valuable medieval fresco of the "Madonna del Latte."
