Basilica of Our Lady of the Assumption: Alcamo’s Mother Church
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Crown of Aragon, Kingdom of Sicily, Spanish
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Basilica
On this page26 sections
History
The Basilica of Our Lady of the Assumption is a Roman Catholic church in Alcamo, Italy, built by the Christian community of Sicily and dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It is Alcamo’s mother church and belongs to the Diocese of Trapani. Founded in the fourteenth century and first opened for worship in 1402, it developed from a Catalan-Gothic church into the building shaped by later rebuilding, decoration, and restoration.
Foundation and medieval development
Alcamo’s first mother church stood on the northern side of the San Vito quarter. It was initially dedicated to Our Lady, Source of Mercy, and later to Our Lady of the Star. The abandoned building survives as Santa Maria della Stella. In 1332, residents of San Vito moved toward the castle of the Counts of Modica, and a new mother church was built on the site of the present basilica. The building opened for worship in 1402.
The original church followed the Catalan-Gothic tradition, a late-medieval style associated with Catalonia and its cultural sphere and characterized by broad church spaces with Gothic structural forms. It was enlarged or altered in 1471, between 1530 and 1558, and again in 1581. By about the sixteenth century, the church had given its name to one of Alcamo’s four districts, the Maggiore Chiesa, or “Greater Church,” quarter.
Religious institutions and rebuilding
The Company of Santa Maria dello Stellario was founded in the church in 1602 by villagers and butchers. In 1625, the company moved to the Church of the Stellario. The mother church was rebuilt in 1699 by Giuseppe Diamante and Angelo Italia, an architect associated with the Society of Jesus. Its Neoclassical facade was completed in 1786 by Emanuele Cardona, following a design by Francesco Alessandro.
Several religious congregations were established in the church during the twentieth century. The Sacramentine congregation was founded there in 1918, followed by the Ursuline congregation in 1919 and the Assuntine congregation in 1936. Until the first half of the twentieth century, the dome was covered with majolica tiles. These were later replaced by copper sheets.
Modern religious and civic history
In 1954, a three-metre-high statue of the Madonna was placed on the bell tower for the Marian Year and the centenary of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Pope Paul VI elevated the church to a minor basilica on 13 May 1969 through the pontifical decree Qui Consideret Quamvis, signed and notarized by Cardinal Luigi Traglia. A minor basilica is a church given a special papal honor because of its religious, historical, or pastoral importance, without becoming the seat of a bishop.
During the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy in 2015, the mother church was designated a Holy Door of Alcamo together with the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Miracles. The adjoining garden had served from the fifteenth century as a cemetery with common graves for poor people. It also contained an altar used for Mass during epidemics and a stone cross with a small shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Mercy. In the twentieth century, the area became a public garden, and a war memorial by the sculptor Bentivegna of Sciacca was installed there in 1929.
Preservation and the sacred-art museum
The former Oratory of the Most Holy Sacrament beside the church became a sacred-art museum in 2010 at the initiative of the Bishop of Trapani. The museum occupies 400 square metres and contains 150 paintings, sculptures, and works of goldsmithery from Alcamo’s churches, dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Its formation was connected with the 1968 Belice earthquake, which made many local churches unusable. Monsignor Vincenzo Regina sheltered works in the basilica and its adjoining rooms, and the museum later brought together many of these objects. The museum therefore preserves material from a wider religious landscape as well as from the mother church itself.
Remains
The basilica has a basilican plan, with a central nave and two side aisles separated by two rows of columns. The columns have single-piece red-marble shafts quarried from nearby Mount Bonifato. The interior stuccoes were made by the Curti family, while the floor follows a design by the architect Giuseppe Patricolo. The church contains five chapels in the left aisle, six in the right aisle, and six near the apse, the rounded or polygonal termination beyond the main altar. The chapels were historically maintained and decorated by local families, and also served as family burial places.
Medieval fabric and principal spaces
Bell tower and early features
The bell tower, with its double-lancet windows, is among the surviving elements of the fourteenth-century church. It was restored in 1942 and now carries the three-metre-high Madonna statue installed in 1954. Other medieval survivals include the Chapel of the Holy Thorn and the baptismal font, a basin used for Christian baptism.
Apse and main chapel
The apse contains a 1605 canvas of the Assumption attributed to the Flemish painter Franz Van Castel, also known as Francesco da Castello. A wooden choir made in 1748 occupies the same area. Near the apse, the Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Jesus fills the right transept, the crosswise part of a church that intersects the nave, and contains a wooden statue made by L. Santifaller in 1955.
Bell-tower door and sacristy portals
The sixteenth-century door of the bell tower was executed in 1499 and is attributed to Bartolomeo Berrettaro. Its marble reliefs show the Annunciation, the Madonna and Child between Saints Peter and Paul, and an upper Crucifixion. Stefano Adragna was its patron. The sacristy also has a portal dated 1500, whose side pilasters carry plant-like decoration.
Chapels and devotional works
Right aisle chapels
The Chapel of Privilege, formerly owned by the Mastrandrea family, has a marble altarpiece carved by Antonello Gagini in 1519. Its triptych shows the Madonna between Saints Philip and James, while the lower section, or predella, depicts the Dormitio Virginis, an image of Mary’s death or “falling asleep” before her bodily assumption. The chapel also contains seventeenth-century canvases of Saint Carlo Borromeo and Saint Philip Neri. Minutilla’s painting of Saint Philip Neri, made in 1637, came from the Church of Santa Maria del Soccorso.
Saint Lucy’s Chapel, formerly belonging to the De Ballis family, contains the sarcophagi of Giovannello De Ballis, its founder, and his son Graziano. Two portraits of Don Giovanni De Ballis and his brother Giuseppe, dating from the first half of the seventeenth century, are attributed to Filippo Paladini. The Chapel of Saints Crispin and Crispinian contains a canvas painted by Tommaso Pollaci in 1776.
The Chapel of the Crucifix contains the Abundance Crucifix, made by Antonello Gagini between 1519 and 1523 in mistura. It is a copy of a crucifix in the Church of San Domenico in Palermo made by the Matinati family. The Chapel of Our Lady of Fatima contains a wooden statue by L. Santifaller from 1949 and a 1566 canvas of Our Lady of Graces by Giovan Leonardo Bagolino, father of Sebastiano Bagolino. The canvas also came from Santa Maria del Soccorso.
Giuseppe Rizzo’s Chapel
Giuseppe Rizzo’s Chapel was designed by Paolo Portoghesi and inaugurated in 1995. It contains a modern architectural work dedicated to Don Giuseppe Rizzo, founder of a Salesian oratory and of the bank that bore his name, together with his remains. A Salesian oratory is a place for prayer, religious instruction, and youth care associated with the congregation founded by John Bosco.
Chapel of the Holy Thorn
The Chapel of the Holy Thorn was built in 1430 at the request of Palma de Gambono. Formerly called the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, it later passed through marriage to the Marcanza family, owners of the Church of Saint Thomas the Apostle. It was bricked up in the early eighteenth century and reopened in 1958.
An unidentified artist painted its Pentecost fresco. The chapel also contains a silver reliquary dated 1636, a container made to preserve and display a sacred relic, holding the object known as the Holy Thorn. Tradition identifies it as a thorn from Christ’s crown and says that Charles V brought it to Alcamo in 1535. The same tradition holds that it arrived with two other thorns, which Bishop Girolamo de Terminis ordered burned, while this one remained intact.
Chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament
The Chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament contains Giuseppe Carrera’s Last Supper, commissioned by the confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament in 1614. Its side walls also carry Guglielmo Borremans’s scenes of the Wedding at Cana and the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. On the vault, Borremans painted Catholic Faith assisted by the Paraclete, a title for the Holy Spirit as helper, advocate, or consoler.
Chapels near the apse
The Chapel of Our Lady of Miracles contains a wooden statue carved by Lorenzo Curti in 1720. The statue is carried in procession during Alcamo’s June festival of Our Lady of Miracles, the city’s patron and the subject of its most important feast. Saint Anne’s Chapel contains sixteenth-century sarcophagi belonging to the brothers Giovanni and Giuseppe De Ballis.
Left aisle and transept chapels
Saint Peter’s Chapel
Saint Peter’s Chapel, in the left transept, contains an altar, a gilded marble statue of Saint Peter made by Giacomo Gagini in 1586, and the body of Saint Vincent the Martyr. A nearby crypt, a below-ground chamber often used for burial, served for the burial of priests and was formerly open to visitors.
Saint Francis’s Chapel
Saint Francis’s Chapel contains a late-fourteenth-century fresco of Our Lady of the Snows by an unknown artist. Its date links the painting to the early history of the church and to the period in which the medieval building was being used and developed.
Chapel of the Four Crowned Saints
The Chapel of the Four Crowned Saints contains a canvas painted by Filippo Randazzo in 1737. The Four Crowned Saints are traditionally understood in Catholic worship as a group of Christian martyrs. The chapel belonged to the masons’ guild, which was founded in 1548.
Chapel of Our Lady of Trapani
The Chapel of Our Lady of Trapani, also called Our Lady of Graces, contains a marble Madonna and Child by Giuseppe Marino from 1730. It also preserves a bas-relief of the Dormition of the Virgin sculpted by Antonello Gagini in 1529.
Chapel of Our Lady of Carmine
The Chapel of Our Lady of Carmine contains two paintings by Guglielmo Borremans and a wooden statue of Our Lady of Carmel made between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Chapel of Our Lady of Light
Formerly belonging to the Abbati family, the Chapel of Our Lady of Light contains a marble baptismal font by Antonello Gagini from the beginning of the sixteenth century. It also has a late-eighteenth-century canvas of Our Lady of Light by Giuseppe Renda.
Fresco cycle and sacristy works
Paintings by Guglielmo Borremans
The basilica contains 38 frescoes by Guglielmo Borremans, a Flemish-born painter active in Sicily and known for large religious fresco cycles. Three paintings on the vault, completed in 1735, present the Assumption of the Virgin with the Trinity, Saints Anne and Joachim, John the Baptist, David, patriarchs, cherubim, angels, and archangels; the Coronation of the Virgin with the Eucharistic Word in her breast, the Trinity, and angels; and the crowned Virgin Queen seated among clouds with a sceptre, accompanied by Saints Peter and Paul and saints who founded religious and monastic orders, including Saint Rosalia.
Above the large marble pillars, Borremans painted the four Evangelists writing Gospel mottos in Mary’s honor. In Saint Peter’s Chapel, angels with pontifical insignia surround the Chair of Saint Peter, supported by the four apocalyptic animals. Beneath the cornice are scenes of Melchizedek blessing Abraham, Moses crossing the Red Sea, Elijah calling fire onto the altar, and a Jewish pontiff seated on the Chair of Moses before prostrate lepers.
The Chapel of the Crucifix has Borremans’s angels bearing the instruments of the Passion and the Archangel Michael with a shining cross surrounded by seraphim. Beneath its cornice are the Death of Abel, the Sacrifice of Abraham, the story of the bronze serpent, and the Death of Samson. In the main chapel, Borremans depicted the Virgin with the Eucharistic Word in her breast and the Holy Spirit as a bright flame above her head, the Virgin in glory beside the divine Son handing her a sceptre, and the Paraclete as a dove between angels scattering roses.
Above the main entrance, John appears in ecstasy on Patmos while an angel with a golden reed points toward the celestial Jerusalem, shown with gold, gems, the Tree of Life, and the light of the divine Lamb. In the Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary, Borremans painted Abigail calming David’s anger against her husband Nabal and Boaz giving wheat to Ruth the Moabite.
Sacristy sculpture and painting
The sacristy contains works attributed to Bartolomeo Berrettaro, including a statue of Our Lady of Help and the lunette from the portal of the former Church of Santa Maria del Soccorso. Together with the carved bell-tower door, these works extend the basilica’s collection of Sicilian religious sculpture from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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