In 1508 the people of Grottole began worshipping in a new church, raised on the remains of two demolished chapels and dedicated to Saints Luke and Julian: it was meant to replace Santa Maria Maggiore as the town's mother church. The work dragged on for generations — the lintel of the main portal carries the date 1595 — and what came out of it was the largest building in Grottole, 20 metres wide and 39 metres high. Then came the earthquakes, and today people simply call it the Diruta, the ruined one.
What to see
The plan is a Latin cross with a single hall: three deep round-arched niches on either side set the rhythm of the nave, which opens onto the transept through a wide triumphal arch. An elliptical dome once stood over the crossing, recognisable from almost anywhere in town. Inside there were nine altars, six confessionals, an organ with nine stops and the baptismal font; the relics kept here — a finger of Saint Luke the Evangelist and fragments of the Holy Cross — are now held at the parish.
The main portal, signed by Giulio Carrara della Padula, bears the town's coat of arms and figures of God the Father and the four Evangelists. On the bell tower along the flank you can still read the relief of the 16-rayed star, the badge of the Del Balzo family. A splayed window from the fifteenth century is a reminder that the builders leaned on older structures.
Visiting
The Diruta is no longer a working church and has no roof: the nave vault came down in the mid-eighteenth century, after the 1694 earthquake had opened a lengthwise crack through the masonry, and the buttressing block added in 1767 was not enough to save it. The 1980 earthquake made things worse. You read it from the outside, walking around it through the Rione Cristoforo Colombo: the perimeter walls, the polygonal apse and the empty niches are all still there, with sky where the vaults used to be.
Our editors' tip
Stop in front of the portal and look for the date 1595 on the lintel: from there, running your eye up the façade, you get the measure of how tall the finished building was. Then go down a few lanes towards the lower part of town and turn around — the outline of the elliptical dome above the roofs says better than anything what Grottole has lost.