The bell of Accettura's mother church carries a date and a name: 1611, Gaspare di Missanello, the founder who cast it. The church is far older than its bell, since it is documented before the 16th century, but little of that building is still visible: one restoration followed another until its appearance was almost entirely rewritten. What survived ended up inside, and every piece carries its own date.
What to see
The oldest is the wooden crucifix of the 15th century. Beside it, a group of statues, also in wood, lines up devotions from very different moments: Saint Anthony the Abbot is 16th-century, while Saint Julian, Saint Philomena and Saint Paschal all arrive together from the middle of the 18th. From the same years comes the canvas of Mary Magdalene, the three Marys and Saint John at the foot of the cross, a subject that looks not at Christ but at the people left below him.
Visiting
No list records what was rebuilt and when: the church has to be read as a set of layers, and the only reliable calendar is the one the works carry with them, from the fifteenth-century crucifix to the statues of the mid-eighteenth. Among these is the wooden Saint Julian, the patron of Accettura and the saint of the Maggio festival, which opens every year on Pentecost Sunday. If you want to find the door open, aim for a service time: that is when a village mother church is certainly in use.
Our editors' tip
Look at the three mid-eighteenth-century statues together — Saint Julian, Saint Philomena, Saint Paschal — and then at the canvas from the same span of years: they form a single block, the sign that in that half century the church was refurnished almost from scratch. Then go back to the three oldest pieces, the fifteenth-century crucifix, the sixteenth-century Saint Anthony the Abbot and the bell of 1611: those are the ones that season left where they were.