Chiesa della Santissima Annunziata

Beneath the castle rock of Forza d'Agrò, the church carrying the Annunciation title is the borgo's mother church, seat of the parish of Santa Maria Annunziata e Assunta. Rebuilt in the early 1700s after earthquakes destroyed its 15th-century predecessor, it fronts the piazza that Coppola's cameras made famous.

Why it matters

Two dedications meet in one building — the Annunciation and the Assumption — and together they name the parish that the Arcidiocesi di Messina-Lipari-Santa Lucia del Mela records at Via SS. Annunziata, in the vicariate of Roccalumera and Santa Teresa di Riva. This is the church in which Forza d'Agrò baptises, marries and buries, and its square doubles as the town's outdoor hall. Cinema amplified that role: the local filmography log records the piazza and the church of the Santissima Annunziata in The Godfather (1972), again in the sequel, and in The Godfather Part III (1990), alongside later Italian productions and even an animated cameo when Pixar's Cars 2 (2011) drew the church into its Sicily sequence. Few churches of a few hundred inhabitants can claim as much screen life.

What to notice

The facade is an exercise in Spanish-inflected Sicilian Baroque: spiral volutes and pendant curves sweep up to an undulating pediment of pyramidal form, giving the front its restless outline against the mountain behind. The church opens onto the piazza by a broad staircase that serves as seating during the town's events. Inside, the plan runs to three naves divided on columns, with two substantial side chapels and as many as thirteen altars recorded by the town's historical archive, above crypts that received the town's burials. Among the furnishings, three works repay a long look: an Annunciazione painting painted in the manner of Antonello da Messina's school, a marble statue of St Catherine of Alexandria carved in the mid-1500s — the archive dates it 1558 and names Martino Montanini and Giuseppe Bottone as sculptors — and the painted wooden Crucifix venerated as the patronal image.

Context and history

A church stood here by the 15th century, serving the borgo that had formed under the castle. Earthquakes broke that first building: it gave way after the quake of the later 1640s and was damaged again when the great 1693 earthquake ran through eastern Sicily. The rebuilding that produced the present church belongs to the early 1700s, and the parish record of the archdiocese now lists its main church formally as the Chiesa di Santa Maria Annunziata e Assunta. A restoration completed in 2001 consolidated the structure. The building is also known as the Duomo di Forza d'Agrò, reflecting its role as the town's mother church.