Church of St Clare

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.