Italian artworks

Perhaps even before stopping to consider the beautiful façade of the church, we were drawn to the statue in the middle of the square on the side of Via Roma that celebrates the long militancy, first Garibaldi and then Republican, of Napoleone Colajanni, a politician, a long-time parliamentarian and finally also a professor of statistics born in the city in the mid-19th century. The church of St Clare that stands out from the top of its staircase, a 17th-century building that had belonged to the Jesuits of Enna until shortly after the mid-1800s, with their College next door. The initials of the religious order still stand above the entrance portal, while a frieze inside recalls that it was the nobleman Francesco Rotundo who funded the original construction. After the suppression of the Society of Jesus, the church took its present name when it was assigned to the Clarist nuns of the city. After World War II it was converted into a sacrarium for the fallen soldiers in the war, turning the side chapels into lapidaries but preserving the remarkable tiled floor of the mid-19th century. This depicts in colour the "Advent of Steamship" and the Triumph of Christianity over Islam, and is indeed an unusual work. The former Jesuit college is still a school and secondary school today.

It is always a stroll along the axis of Via Roma through the entire historic centre of Enna that leads one to find, after the cathedral and the airy Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, the charming and historic square named after Francesco Paolo Neglia: the municipal theatre is also named after this nineteenth–twentieth-century composer and conductor. The mermaids on the fountain in the centre are a recent local work, but they seem to have settled well between the imposing bell tower of the church of San Tommaso and the baroque doorway of the Anime Sante del Purgatorio (Church of the Holy Souls) between which they have come to rest. Until a few decades ago, the square was itself called San Tommaso, with the church's bell tower having originally been one of the city's defensive towers and its fifteenth-century portico in the Gothic-Catalan style not uncommon in Enna: inside the church, the high altar is adorned with an early 16th-century marble altarpiece. The Anime Sante, on the other hand, is a somewhat more recent building, dating from the late 17th century: upon entering, one discovers remarkable 18th-century stuccoes and frescoes by Flemish craftsmen in the vault.

Named after Our Lady of the Visitation, the city's patron saint, the Cathedral stands on a rocky relief at the top of a spectacular staircase, the imposing façade looking down onto the square below. Built in the early 1300s by an Aragonese queen, after the building was destroyed in a devastating fire, it was reconstructed a century and a half later. Only the apse retains evidence of the original structure, including a beautiful walled Gothic portal: this is the Jubilee Gate requested from the Pope in order to support the reconstruction. The sombre and imposing aspect is mainly due to the portal, also 16th-century. The marble relief with its vibrant decoration of St Martin on horseback and the pauper, with whom the saint shares his mantle, was once housed in the castle chapel. The twin sculpted lions at the base of the portal are from the Aragonese era, but the truly amazing feature of the interior is the 16th-century panelled ceiling above the central nave, divided from the side aisles by a double row of lava stone columns. The elaborately-decorated marble pulpit dates from the 17th century. Among the large paintings on display, the five of the Virgin Mary in the apse particularly stand out: they are the work of an early 17th-century Tuscan painter. The Treasure of the cathedral is open to the public at the Alessi Museum, just a short distance away towards the castle. The largest and most stunning piece is the Baroque-style crown of the patron saint.