Santuario di San Francesco di Paola

Above Milazzo’s old quarter, the sanctuary of San Francesco di Paola stands on the hill of San Biagio. The city invited the Calabrian saint in 1464; its Baroque facade and broad staircase frame a long tradition of devotion associated with the Berrettella reliquary.

Why it matters

Local tradition connects Francesco’s arrival at Milazzo with the legend of his crossing the Strait of Messina on his mantle. Tradition holds that he laid out the church and convent begun on San Biagio hill on 17 January 1465. Completed just over three years later and first dedicated to Jesus and Mary, the complex was later renamed for its founder. The Berrettella, a silver reliquary associated with his cap, forms a focus of local devotion.

What to notice

The broad staircase belongs to the eighteenth-century remodelling; a statue of the saint on the stairs dates to 1760. The facade plays pink-toned Syracuse stone against Corinthian columns and a wrought-iron balcony. A cannonball embedded in the north wall commemorates the clash between Garibaldine and Bourbon troops on 20 July 1860. The Gesù e Maria chapel has carved and gilded Rococo woodwork. A marble Madonna and Child of the Gaginian school bears the arms of the Ventimiglia family. The high altar, commissioned in 1751 by the baron Paolo Lucifero, carries allegories of Faith and Hope, and the niche of 1916 by Gaetano Recupero now frames the image of the saint. The walnut choir, made in 1759–60, has fourteen stalls; the organ dates to 1760. In the apse, Vincenzo Severino’s fresco of the Multiplication and stained glass by Salvatore Gregorietti date to 1914. Tradition associates two large boulders at the wall bases with the saint’s remark that they could serve instead of foundations.

Context and history

The sanctuary was built on the ruins of a small church dedicated to San Biagio dei Ragusei, on ground the city granted on the colle San Biagio. The original complex was named Gesù e Maria; the nave was reversed and enlarged around 1620, when the convent became the novitiate house of the Messina monastic province and the entrance moved from the west side to the east. Bombardment in 1718 and successive repairs carried the buildings towards their present, late-baroque appearance, consolidated around the middle of the eighteenth century with the elegant facade and staircase. The twentieth century tested the church severely: a fire on 10 May 1908 destroyed the early altarpiece, and the Messina earthquake of that December opened a restoration campaign that produced the Severino frescoes, the Gregorietti glass and the Recupero niche between 1914 and 1916. The convent served as a study college from 1620 to 1855 and later partly as a school. It now houses a Carabinieri barracks in part. Excavations in the 1930s uncovered a Hellenistic-Roman mosaic dated to the second century BC, evidence of earlier settlement on the hill. In the crypt floor, inscribed with the date 1770, rest the relics of the martyr Santa Candida translated from the Roman catacombs in the eighteenth century, and the tomb of the patriotic senator Domenico Piraino.