Chiesa di San Domenico

At the lower end of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, San Domenico’s convex facade opens onto Piazza XVI Maggio. Designed by Rosario Gagliardi for the Dominican fathers and built between 1703 and 1727, the church has an elongated Greek-cross interior crowned by five stuccoed domes.

Why it matters

San Domenico is a defining monument of Noto’s late Baroque. Its facade brings movement, chiaroscuro and a theatrical relationship with the street into a single composition. It was raised as a conventual church for the Dominican fathers in the first decades of the rebuilt city, which makes it one of the earliest major buildings of the new Noto and an early statement of the style that would spread along the whole corso.

What to notice

The facade’s central bay is strongly convex, and a short curved staircase leads to its two-order elevation: Doric below and Ionic above, with free-standing columns that animate the surface through deep shadows. Gagliardi used this device at San Carlo Borromeo and the cathedral as well. The interior follows an elongated Greek-cross plan beneath five domes covered in stucco. The high altar holds a statue of the Madonna del Rosario. The paintings include a canvas of San Corrado by Antonio Mazza and works by Vito D’Anna depicting San Vincenzo Ferreri and the Madonna del Rosario. The sacristy retains a seventeenth-century stone washbasin and an eighteenth-century inlaid wooden cabinet.

Context and history

Rosario Gagliardi designed the church between 1703 and 1727 as the conventual church of the Dominican fathers, and the adjoining convent belongs to the same campaign: the Ministry of Culture's catalog records that the rusticated portal of the convent block is the work of Gagliardi's pupil Vincenzo Sinatra, while Gagliardi's own contribution there was confined to the design of the window above the entrance. The concave-convex play of the facade had precedents among Roman church fronts, and its arrival in Noto helped define the local late Baroque. The religious complex did not keep its original purpose for long: with the suppression of religious orders under the law of 7 July 1866, the convent passed to the State, became a school and boarding house from 1877, and lost much of its original layout in the conversion. The church survives alongside the square and the gardens of the Villetta di Ercole.