There is a baronial coat of arms over the entrance portal, and it is the signature of the man who put the building back up: the archpriest Baffari, uncle of the blessed Giambattista Rossi. The 1694 earthquake had almost flattened the older church that stood here, and it was he who rebuilt it under the title of Santa Maria del Carmine. Thirty years later the story repeated itself: the 1725 tremor cracked it badly and another restoration was needed. The church sits on the edge of Ripacandida, near the entrance to the old cemetery, and the name of the man who remade it is written in stone above the door rather than filed away on paper.
What to see
The interior decoration, carried out in the first half of the eighteenth century, is the reason to go in. Recent restoration work has brought the frescoes back to their original colour: the Holy Trinity, the Madonna del Carmine, and the medallions with Saint Donatus the bishop and Saint Donatus of Ripacandida, called Donatello here, the town's protector. Beside the altar stands a seventeenth-century sculpture of the Madonna del Carmine.
What is missing is the piece the church was known for. Its only side altar carried the «Martyrdom of Saint Julia» by Paolo De Matteis, commissioned in 1718 by the duke of Ripacandida, Giuseppe Teroni, in memory of his wife Giulia Gaudioso: she had died two years earlier and had been laid at the foot of the altar table. When the church began to threaten collapse after the earthquake, altar and painting were carried off, and since 1732 they have been in the sanctuary of San Donato.
Visiting
From outside the church promises little: a plain gable façade whose only ornament is the marble portal with its pediment, the one carrying the arms. The contrast with the inside is what justifies the stop. Look first for the two medallions of the Donatus saints: on a church dedicated to the Madonna del Carmine they are the most local part of the decoration, and they say who this altar really belonged to.
Our editors' tip
Keep half an hour for the sanctuary of San Donato, at the north-eastern entrance to the town: that is where the altar and the «Martyrdom of Saint Julia» ended up in 1732, and seeing both churches in one afternoon is the only way to put back together what the earthquake separated.