A band of moulded terracotta tiles with festoons runs across the lintel of the doorway, and above it a second band, also in terracotta, decorated with ovals: brickyard work rather than stonemason's work, applied to a chapel barely larger than a room. The church of Santa Maria Immacolata in Chiaromonte is in fact a single rectangular hall, and it stands immediately north of the Norman-period fortified circuit, a few dozen metres from what was probably one of the fortified entrances to the town. Those walls, with their round and square towers, were raised by the Chiaromonte and Sanseverino families, the same feudal lords who built the castle that later became a monastery.
What to see
The façade holds everything. The doorway is rectangular, framed between two plain columns set on rectangular piers and closed at the top by two capitals: each carries three smoothed leaves surmounted by three small globes. Above them come the two terracotta bands of the lintel. Higher up, flush with the wall, sits a small bell gable, the simplest possible way of carrying a bell. The building was restored not long ago, and the surfaces show it.
Visiting
The chapel faces piazza Umberto I, which everyone in Chiaromonte still calls Chiazzoll': it is also the name of one of the old quarters of the town, and the quickest way to be pointed in the right direction. Look at the lintel first, before going in: the tiles were made in a mould and the motifs repeat, and working out where the mould starts again tells you more than any label. Inside there is a single room; it reads in a minute.
Our editors' tip
From the square walk down towards the mother church and look just below it for the Portello, the oldest gate into the town, which gives its name to the quarter around it. Walking back from there to the chapel, measure those few dozen metres with your own feet: that is the distance between the church and the Norman wall, and it explains why it ended up exactly there.
