Chiesa Madre San Nicolò

From the north-west corner of Avola's hexagon, the mother church holds the position its designer chose in the weeks after the 1693 earthquake: dominant, frontal, facing the palace of the feudal lords across Piazza Umberto I. Its parish carries San Sebastiano's name today, yet the building keeps its older title, San Nicolò.

Why it matters

The Chiesa Madre was the first sacred space fixed on the map of the new Avola. The parish's own history records that the Jesuit architect Angelo Italia, tracing the hexagonal city in March 1693, reserved the square's north-west side for it and that the foundation stone was blessed on 6 April 1693 — with the city's first cemetery laid beneath the forecourt. A church had stood on the old hill site with the title of San Nicolò since at least 1308, so this building deliberately re-established a documented institution, not just a congregation. Its tower facade, conceived at the close of the seventeenth century, anticipated the tower-like church frontages that later spread through the towns of the Val di Noto, which is why the regional tourism portal presents it as a reference point for understanding late-baroque religious architecture in south-eastern Sicily.

What to notice

Work outward in. The forecourt (sagrato) was enclosed in 1774 by ten tall pedestals carved with rococo acanthus and crowned by sandstone statues; six deteriorated pieces were removed in the late 1920s, and the surviving figures of San Giovanni Battista, Santa Venera, San Nicolò and San Pietro still face Corso Garibaldi, four pedestals having been repositioned in 2004. The facade rises in white "pirrera della Palma" limestone through Tuscan, Ionic and Corinthian orders, with niches of the Immaculate and San Giuseppe flanking the portal and a frieze of metopes and triglyphs. Inside, a Latin cross of three naves holds a dense art itinerary: the 1787 marble baptismal font by Giuseppe Bonaventura of Catania, maiolica pavements fired in Naples by the Attanasio workshop, a Madonna del Rosario attributable to a follower of Sebastiano Conca (documented 1737), Giovanni Villamaci's statue of the Immaculate Conception (1711), the Madonna del Lume brought from Malta in 1741, a wooden crucifix linked to the school of frate Umile di Petralia, canvases by Simone Ventura, and the main altar of 1861 paid for by canon Giuseppe Di Maria.

Context and history

Construction, begun from a design attributed to the Ferla master Antonio Mastrogiacomo, moved forward from 1696 funded by the tax on slaughterhouses; Michelangelo Alessi of Syracuse raised the interior and carved the portal capitals and the three-pot arms of Nicolò Pignatelli. When Corrado Paternò completed the tiburio in 1741, the church was blessed and opened for worship. The parish history, written by the art historian Francesca Gringeri Pantano, also records the 1963 chased copper doors by Francesco Patanè of Acireale showing the Seven Sacraments, the rebuilding of the tiburio during the 2002 restorations, and the 1986 decision that gave the parish its present dedication to San Sebastiano, martyr and patron. The crypt of the Confraternita del Ss. Viatico, designed in 1769 by Giuseppe Alessi on the model of Palermo's Cappuccini crypt, survives below the transept.