For decades, anyone pushing this door open was after a book, not an altar. Built between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century as the church of the Purgatorio, it was where the people of Montemilone venerated Saint Philip Neri and the Madonna del Carmine; then in 1959, after its bell tower was pulled down, it was sold off and left the parish's hands. Until 2014 it housed the municipal library. Only from that year has it been a church again, under a new title: Madonna Assunta.
What to see
The first thing to look at is the thing that is missing. The bell tower came down in 1959, and ever since the building has read as a low, compact block, without the vertical marker that usually makes a church recognisable from a distance: in Montemilone you have to go looking for this one, you will not find it by raising your eyes.
The double name tells the rest. Church of the Purgatorio as long as Mass was said here, with its two devotions; church of Santa Maria Assunta since 2014, when the books moved out and the building took back the job it had been put up for three centuries earlier. Few churches have a reopening date this close to us.
Visiting
This is a working church, not a museum: no opening times are posted, and your best odds of finding it unlocked are Sundays and service times. Do not expect lavish furnishings inside. The building went through the demolition of its bell tower, the sale and decades of civic use, and what you see today is the result of the return to worship in 2014, not an untouched seventeenth-century interior. The centre of Montemilone can be walked in half an hour, and this is one of four churches in town, along with the mother church of Santo Stefano, the church of the Immacolata Concezione of 1890 and the Gloriosa sanctuary, which stands two kilometres out.
Our editors' tip
End your round at the old town hall, the eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century building that now houses the municipal library 'Annita Stingone', the historical archive and the MARTE, the Museo della Terra di Montemilone, with its 'time machine': that is where the books found a home after 2014. In the square in front stands the clock tower, the work of the engineer Pomodoro of Molfetta, inaugurated on 14 March 1882: thirty-five metres, precisely the kind of marker this church had taken away from it.