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Chapel of the Carmine

In this small religious structure still resides the homonymous confraternity.

However, it’s possible that the building was built a few years before the ecclesiastical corporation, therefore before 1777. The building, which is larger than the other city chapels, consists of a single barrel vaulted room, lowered with lunettes, and divided into three parts of coupled plastered arches set on pilasters with capitals shaped on the Corinthian model, some of which still retain the plaster base that is typical of this architectural order.

Above the entrance there’s a wooden choir loft which houses a small organ built in the nineteenth century; on the back wall there’s an 18th century polychrome marble altar, surmounted by an aedicule which houses the wooden statue of the Madonna del Monte Carmelo.

The building denotes a certain wealth as a place and it was used not only by the brotherhood, but also as a burial space. We may see a sarcophaguson the left of the entrance which is made of local marble; several commemorative epigraphs of nobles of the time; a well-made canvas depicting the Holy Family, a work that dates back to the 18th century which currently resides in the small room of the sacristy. There’s a possibility that the canvas, with a mixtilinear outline, must have dominated the main altar before the niche for the sculpture of the Virgin.

There are no traces, on the recent floor of the chapel, of access hatches to the funerary hypogeum (to which, first of all, the mortal remains of the brothers were entrusted) which, probably, as in other chapels and churches, has been only recently occluded. It is certain, however, that this chapel also serves as a burial ground and, like the traces inside it, it was also of a certain prestige.

The façade, covered with plaster, has an entrance surmounted by a stucco tympanum and a gable closure, with a triangular stucco tympanum, the logical conclusion of a front behind which there is a wooden roof.

Texts by Francesco Miraglia & Corrado Valente
Photo by Angelo Razzano
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