The Purgatorio Church was erected on the site of an older church in 1642-1664.
Inside, the stucco decoration of the apse was done in 1746 by the Castelvetrano brothers Nicola and Gaspare Curti.
On the altar, there is the big canvas attributed to Olivio Sozzi (1690-1765) and showing The Trinity, the Vergin and Souls in Purgatory.The facade, done at the start of the eighteenth century, sixty years after the edifice was built, was conceived as a decorative element of the square rather than of the church; this is confirmed by the vertical quality impressed in the facade, which was built narrower than the church was, the side doors being moved closer to the central one, so as to accentuate the ascensional movement of the architectural elements forming it.
The movement culminates, at the top and centre, in the group of angels over the big cornice holding the cross: a group that the 1968 earthquake ruined, weakening its elan, and that it is necessary to restore if the church is to get back its past role in the context of the square.
Between the San Pietro and Purgatorio churches Piazza Garibaldi tends to narrow: hence the San Pietro bell-tower on the one side and the soaring facade of the Purgatorio church on the other until a short time ago helped to close off the spaces in a scenic manner, as had happened on the opposite side between the cathedral church and the Town Hall.
Today the result is less showy (especially because the San Pietro campanile no longer exists), but the allusion is evident. After San Pietro, the square again widens in what in the past was called Large delle Botteghelle, and then narrows once and for all where Via Garibaldi starts. The interplay of narrowing and widening spaces is hence repeated and the scenic effects deriving from it reappear.
In Garibaldi Square, opposite the Palace of the Princes, there is the cathedral church.
Dedicated to the Madonna of the Assumption, it was born of a fusion between the old Santa Maria church (documented starting from the fourteenth century) and the adjacent Santa Chiara chapel and the San Giorgio one, the base of the future campanile.Totally restructured in 1520-79, the church has a Norman basilica layout (nave and two side aisles with short transept and raised presbytery); the portal has a medieval-like character in the revetment, with artisanal arabesques. The decoration of the interior was done in the late seventeenth century by Antonino Ferraro the Younger and Gaspare Serpotta. The truss roof has a central beam richly painted with coats-of-arms, musical instruments and weapons, and is dated 1564-1570.
There are fine works of art, inside, with canvases by Orazio Ferraro (the Madonna of the Assumption, 1618 Santa Chiara, early seventeenth century); the picture of the Madonna with Child between St. Crispin and St. Crispinian (1573); the sculpted wooden cover of the baptismal font, by Pietro di Giato (1610); the fine marble statue by an artist of the Gagini school, showing the Madonna of the Lily (1570); the fifteenthcentury painting on wood of the Madonna of Mercy (workshop of Riccardo Quarteraro?): the wooden choir designed in 1864 by the architect Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda and executed by the Palermo sculptor Vincenzo Coco.
On the basis of the 1849 report by Cavallari and Viviani (respectively an eminent archaeologist and a local architect), towards the middle of the century restoration of the church began, with the aim of removing everything in it that was from the seventeenth century and privileging its Renaissance aspects.
This was because the Baroque was now considered a decadent epoch, while the Renaissance was seen as an age of artistic splendour. Among the works from that epoch which have remained and are of interest, though in a poor state of conservation, are the stuccoes of the Chapel of Mary Magdalene, by Tommaso Ferraro (sixteenth-century).
The cathedral church remains isolated in the context of the three squares, which helps to give shape to the latter. In Piazza Umberto, on the north side, there stands the imposing cathedral church campanile. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its base was built up to the first floor and inside the San Giorgio chapel was made.
The construction of the upper floors, up to the windows where the bells are placed, was done - under architect Giovanni Gandolfo - in 1552, although it was not completed, the top and the battlements not being done. The portal with an inflected archivolt, the stringcourse cornices and the simple mullioned windows with architraves give beauty and elegance to the massive volume of the building.
Between the campanile and the cathedral church, an intermediate construction connects the two monumental complexes: in it there is the staircase leading up into the campanile, and a frieze, defined by a broken line which at its end wraps round a flower, hides the connection with the tower.
Creek palmettes adorn the terminal frieze of the Magdalene chapel behind, while the centre is dominated by a shield with a palmtree, the emblem of the Tagliavias, who were the patrons of the chapel.
The campanile, the apse of the Gentiluomini chapel, and the apse of the Giglio chapel create an interplay of volumes perceptible from Via Militello, which, together with the balconies and portals of the old houses looking out on the street, give rise to one of the most evocative parts of old Castelvetrano.
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The San Domenico church was built by the Tagliavias, seigniors of the town, in 1470. The choir and presbytery were decorated with frescoes and stuccoes by Antonino Ferraro da Giuliana in 1574-80.This is a fundamental work for the history of architecture in Sicily, and precisely for the moment of the shortened transition from late Gothic to mannerism and the Baroque, the fact that it was commissioned by Don Carlos of Aragona, first Prince of Castelvetrano, and later President of the Kingdom, Governor of Milan, Viceroy of Catalonia, President of the Council of Italy, "might explain not only the splendour but also the international quality of the style, which set the work, so far unjustly neglected, in the best southern decoration" (Barricelli).Bare and austere in its original look, with the bare stone and the acute line of the Gothic arches, after a century the San Domenico church underwent a radical change. Antonino Ferraro, called on by Prince Don Carlos to decorate the triumphal arch and the choir chapel, energetically set about his appointed task, giving a Baroque look to every part with great verve, even when a part was vast and Gothic and possibly had columns and corner niches sometimes with ribbing. He saw to everything: "the overall architecture, the lively stucco figures in the Michelangelo manner. the painterly and sculptural decoration; the little pictures, the landscapes in the panels, the plaques with rough and superimposed edges, the taste for which was spreading in the later sixteenth century" (Calandra).
However, it is above all the complex of statues on the front that arouses admiration and wonder in visitors: Jesse, lying on a plane supported by ledges, holds up a genealogical tree in whose branches there are the twelve rulers who succeeded him, and at the top there is the Virgin Mary, crowned by angels: "A unique work for the novelty of the masculine and bold conception, for the mass of larger-than-life statues which, set in different stances, seem to detach themselves from the wall and hover in the air" (Riga). In the choir, there is the sarcophagus of Ferdinando Aragona e Tagliavia (who died in 1549); at the centre, the tomb of the Aragona-Tagliavia family in the eighteenth century. Also in the choir, in the right corner, under the vault impost, there is the self-portrait of Antonino Ferraro, who designed the interior decoration. Next to the San Domenico church there is the monastery, entirely restored and now housing a secondary school.
Built opposite the earlier church, which stood next to the San Domenico monastery, of which there are now no traces, there is the new San Giovanni church, which was built between 1589 and the early seventeenth century, at the behest of the Majo family, who provided much of the money for the new building. From the formal point of view, the sacred edifice is now somewhat different from its original look.In 1777 the campanile, which was adjacent to the apse, was in a very poor static condition, and so it was demolished and then reconstructed by Francesco Giacalone next to the present front.
In 1797-1802 some fundamental parts of the church were modified, like the dome, the windows, the roof, the chapels, and the front.
The windows were modified the existing ones, still visible, were closed and big holes were cut out in the walls covered by platbands.Under the seventeenth century wooden covering the round-arch barrel vaults were done in the nave and the arms of the transept and the ceilings were markedly lowered over the aisles. A new, imposing structural element was inserted, the big dome, probably inspired by the one done by Fuga in Palermo Cathedral.
In 1898 the nave was seriously damaged by fire and the church was closed for many years. The ceiling decoration, done by Francesco Cutrona, was thus lost and replaced by the panels done in 1900-1901 by Gennaro Pardo.
Lastly, the 1968 earthquake dramatically highlighted the main structural weaknesses of the monument. Restoration work has been going on since 1983, making it impossible to reopen the church, which is still awaiting the necessary financing for its definitive recovery.
Among the many works of art in the church there are the fine statue of the Baptrst, dated (1522) and signed by Antonello Gagini, the canvas of the Madonna of Graces attributed to Pietro Novelli, The Beheading of the Baptist, Betrayal by Judas and St. Peter's Denial, all three attributed to Gherardo delle Notti, the painting of St. Carlo Borromeo (1613) by Orazio Ferraro, the wooden covering of the baptistry (1685) by Antonio Mangiapane, which is finely carved. The following paintings also come from San Domenico: St. Raymond of Pennafort with stones of his life (1602) by the Trapani artist Vito Carrera, Adoration of the Magi (signed and dated 1602) by Orazio Ferraro, The Circumcision, a painting on wood by Simon of Wobreck with a wooden frame dated 1585; The Virgin and St. Hyacinth (1599) by Bartolomeo Navarretta: San Vincenzo Ferrerr, perhaps by the Spanish artist Antonello Benavides, who worked in Castelvetrano in 1525-30: a copy by Giovanni Paolo Fondulli (1574) of the Spasimo di Sicilia by Raphael, brought here after the 1982 restoration; and the marble statue of the Madonna of Loreto (1489), attributed by Benedetto Patera to Francesco Laurana.
The Trinita' di Delia church is a few miles west of Castelvetrano, on a little hill, and takes its name from the river running nearby.
A twelfth-century Arab-Byzantine church done by the Normans, it belongs to the group of churches with a central layout, and is the only one, among those which are extant in Sicily, which has come down to us in its entirety.The bare cupola emerges from a cubic dado with sharp edges, resting in turn on four lateral prisms forming steps with the dado above.
The three apses give liveliness to the east front."The hewn stone walls are marked by concentric offsets and by a cornice winding round the windows which wraps round the four faces of the base prism like a continuous and endless ribbon" (Basile).
Entrance is through three ogival portals.
Through the west door women went into the nave: men went in to the aisles through the side doors; wooden barriers divided the nave from the aisles inside: this was because the rite imposed the separation of the sexes.Inside, the cupola is formed by small ashlars placed in superimposed rings tapering from bottom to top. The cupola is connected to the square drum by corner niches formed by arches which allude to other smaller ones inside. The square drum, in turn, is supported by four big ogival arcades which are given elan by the four central columns.
Restored by the Saporitos at the end of the last century, under the supervision of the architect Patricolo, it became the family mausoleum. By and large the church is in a good state of preservation.
This famous virile figure, naked, standing on his vertical axis, is a bronze "kouros" by an unknown author, educated on Sicule sculpture of severe style (480-470 B.C.). It was put in the atrium of the temples with a hand lift to bear the offered to the divinity.The statue bronze found in the year 1882 in street Galera and brought to Castelvetrano's town for the sum 500 liras is cm. 85 height and it is quarry the figure is given in confonnity with the statement tipically archaic in perspective frontal motionless with the right fool a little forwards and the long hair drawn up on the head.
The statue restored in the 1926 was stolen in Castelvetrano's town in the 1962 and found in the 1968.
