Enna heart of Sicily and enchantment of millenary history...

ENNA- THE DOME

The construction of Enna’s dome , that is situated on the homonymous square, began in 1307 and for the wish of the Queen Eleonora, the wife of Frederick the second of Aragona. They say this church was built upon the remains of an ancient pagan temple dedicated to the mythological divinity “ Proserpina”. In 1446 this worship place was almost completely destroyed by a fire . Its reconstruction began in the 1451 and went on until the following century. The bell-tower, of eighteenth century, stands on a portico of Renaissance flavour with three admittances. Of the ancient fourteenth century’s construction, saved from the fire , we can find a part at the right side, where we can admire a portal of the sixteenth century in which there is a reused tympanum, with S.Martin and the poor marble bas-relief, originally, placed in a little church inside the castle of Lombardy. The first thing that impress you into the three aisles, is the contrast between the shafts of the pillars, dark for they are in lava stone and the decorations of the ogival arcade, bright as if they would address the lokk towards the rich and precious wooden-bean ceiling in lacunars, made during the seventeenth century and its curious corbels of winged snouts; under these are twelve pictures of 1672 representing some saints monks and basilian monks. From the sixteenth century are Gabriel Annunciata’s statues placed into the niches realized on the right and on the left of the main access. To be admired, the two holy water font next to the two first pillars and two wooden choirs of the organs, where some pressed niches by some caryatids receive the Apostles statues. In the pulpit made in the first half of the seventeenth century, you can observe the marble processed by Giovanni Gallina according to classicism and renaissance themes. Many are the art works you can admire into the church, made in different ages and all of them of exquisite workmanship as the Flemish’s pictures by Guglielmo Borremans; you can find also pictures by Filippo Paladini and a wooden oil-painting crucifix ascribed to Riccardo Quartarone.