Mater Ecclesiae

It is quite usual for curious travellers, when they arrive in a city, to want to visit its cathedral. Even when you arrive in Enna — almost a thousand metres above sea level, the highest provincial capital in Italy — you expect to find the cathedral. And yet no: the city has no cathedral. Because with the eighteenth-century reorganisation of the Sicilian episcopal sees, Enna was not elevated to a diocese, and the Mother Church would remain just that — it would never become a cathedral. It is beautiful all the same, and its history is bound up with the Norman reconquest of Sicily and with that of another cathedral, the one at Troina, in the far north of the province, the first Muslim stronghold to be reconquered, where indeed the first cathedral was erected, and a cathedral it has remained to this day.

The Mother Church of Enna, on the other hand, was raised on the site of a pre-existing one with a central plan, devastated by a fire in 1400 — of which it probably still preserves the elements of the transept — when in 1412 the city of Enna was dedicated to the Madonna della Visitazione.

Rich in works of art and in wealth, grand in its spaces and its liturgical arrangement: three magnificent naves with pointed arches and capitals, bases and columns of alabaster gypsum, and a coffered wooden ceiling over the main nave with grand sculptures of griffins and angels; a magnificent decorated portal fitted with a “nave” for the organ and, opposite, the choir and pulpit in pale marble. At the base of the columns of the triumphal arch, four sculptures reproduce the faces of Moors, slaves set to guard the part of the church reserved for the clergy. From its reconstruction onwards, important craftsmen worked here, such as the Gagini, a family of sculptors of Swiss origin transplanted to Palermo, who left throughout Sicily most valuable artistic testimonies.

To visit the Mother Church today is like entering a museum, both for the complexity of its architecture and, at the same time, for the importance and richness of the works of art it holds. From the so-called “nave d’oro” (golden ship), the tabernacle in which the statue of the Madonna della Visitazione is placed, to the collection of great canvases, some of them attributed to the Caravaggesque painters Filippo Paladini and Vincenzo Roggeri and to the eighteenth-century Guglielmo Borremans. In the sacristy is the room of the “casciarizzo”, a complex piece of furniture destined for the conservation of sacred fabrics and vestments, flanked by canvases by Pietro Novelli. Accompanied by one of the authorised Kore Siciliae guides, the visit suggests particularly original glances and points of view.

It would be an extraordinary completion of the ideal museum itinerary to be able to admire the “treasure of the Madonna”, today unfortunately not on view, made up of devotional objects in silver and of a collection of goldsmithery — pendants, necklaces, bracelets, a pectoral in the shape of a pelican, and two crowns destined for the Madonna and the Child that are displayed during the procession of 2 July. Many of the objects come from powerful Sicilian landowning families who, at times, gave them as pledges in exchange for loans.

Like many other churches in the grain-growing latifundia, the Mother Church of Enna became significant precisely because of agricultural policy and the dynamics of the great estates, and over the centuries it kept a central role in the religious and social life of the city: around it today unfolds the Good Friday procession, in which about two thousand brethren from the sixteen confraternities — dating back to the Norman age — file past in costume, just as from it and within it the celebrations in honour of the patron saint come to a close.

If you wish to admire these two marvellous feasts from a unique vantage point, or if you simply wish to stay in a place full of charm, stop at the Dimora del Duomo, one of the most beautiful places of hospitality in the city, right beside the Mother Church, where everything bears the Kore Siciliae mark — from the pleasure of Pamela and Giuseppe’s welcome to the identity products you will find on the breakfast trolley.