The church of the Annunziata in Accettura wears Baroque clothes, but its oldest element is a fourteenth-century mullioned window, four centuries older than the building's present appearance. The Baroque did not build here on empty ground: it remade a church that already stood on the spot, and that two-light window is what survives of the earlier phase.
What to see
Inside, two sixteenth-century works tell the same scene twice. The first is a wooden statue of the Madonna with Jesus, dated to around the sixteenth century; the second is a canvas of the same period showing the same subject with the parts reversed. It is not a copy but a mirror image, and comparing the two is the best reason to step inside. The church is dedicated to the Annunciation, while both surviving works show the Madonna already holding the Child.
The window deserves a stop of its own. It carries the oldest date in the whole building and is the clearest trace of what stood here before the rebuilding, since everything else belongs to the later work. That overlap, a body of the church remade and a fourteenth-century detail left in place, is what sets the Annunziata apart from the other churches in the village.
Visiting
The church keeps no museum hours: it opens mainly around services, and outside those times it is worth asking in the village. Once inside, the wooden statue and the canvas are the first two things to look for, and they should be seen one after the other, since taken separately they say far less than they say together.
Our editors' tip
Stand in front of the statue and fix in your mind how the two figures are arranged, then move to the canvas and look for the difference: the parts are reversed, and noticing it yourself is the small reward of the visit. Before you leave, find the mullioned window: it is the piece of this church that saw the fourteenth century.