It was built in 1934, which in Melfi means yesterday: the cathedral is Norman, and there are chapels cut into the rock on the flanks of Mount Vulture. Yet it is this twentieth-century church that marks the most awaited moment of the local year. On Good Friday the procession sets out from here: alongside the sacred images of the Madonna Addolorata and the Dead Christ walk small girls dressed in black, each holding one of the mysteries of the Passion. Its full name is the church of Sant'Anna e Santa Maria del Suffragio, and it belongs to the Cathedral parish.
What to see
This is not a church you visit for its stonework: what counts here are the objects of the rite. The two images carried out on Good Friday, the Addolorata and the Dead Christ, and the mysteries of the Passion, the small symbolic instruments the girls hold along the whole route, belong to this church and to the community around it.
Sant'Anna has its own confraternity which, together with the one at the church of the Carmine, takes care of the Holy Week rites: they are the ones who sing the mournful chants about the tragedy of Golgotha, heard only on those days of the year.
Visiting
The church comes under the Cathedral parish and its hours follow those of services; outside Mass times it is best to ask there, since there is no separate visitor route. Two dates are worth marking: Good Friday, when the procession leaves from the church, and 26 July, the day of the Sant'Anna procession.
Our editors' tip
If you are in Melfi during Holy Week, do not turn up when the procession starts: come earlier, stand in front of the church while the line forms and the girls are being dressed in black. It is in that half hour that you understand this is not a pageant staged for visitors, but something Melfi families hand down from one generation to the next.
