The church of Santa Maria del Suffragio, in Modugno, is known to everyone as the church of Purgatory, after the confraternity that owns it. It stands in piazza Sedile, which until 1822 was called largo Purgatorio. It was built from 1639 and consecrated in 1766. The confraternity, founded in 1632 by Archbishop Ascanio Gesualdo, settled there in 1651; the number of its members is fixed at twenty-four, following seventeenth-century custom. The raised forecourt is the top of a rainwater cistern, put in order in 1860 by the confraternity.
What to see
The tuff façade is preceded by a Neoclassical pronaos in dressed stone, of 1846, closed by a large wrought-iron gate with images of skulls. The two-leaf wooden door, the work of a seventeenth-century Modugno artist, is made of twenty-eight embossed panels with souls in Purgatory, masks, rosettes and cherubs; on the entablature runs a Latin inscription with the date 1641. On the left side, above a secondary entrance, a bas-relief with the souls of Purgatory and a skull bears the inscription «QUOD SIM VIDE», see what I am. Above remains the triangular gable of a pitched roof, pulled down in 1948 because it was unsafe, with a small bell gable.
The interior has a single nave, with five large arches surmounted by communicating galleries and barrel vaults. The majolica floor of the presbytery dates from 1720. There are forty-six paintings of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan school, about thirty of them attributed to Carlo Rosa of Bitonto. The seventeenth-century choir loft, in gilded and inlaid wood, has the canvas of the Madonna del Suffragio and two small symmetrical organs of the eighteenth century; the pulpit too is of gilded wood.
Visiting
The church belongs to the confraternity, which is still active: opening and service times should be checked on the spot.
Our editors' tip
The pronaos is a rebuilding, and a plaque explains why. On 12 August 1842 a tightrope walker stretched a rope between the gable of the church and a nearby building: the rope was not suitable, the gable and the portico beneath it collapsed, and some boys who had come to watch the show were killed. Beside the door are some stone fragments, among them a seventeenth-century coat of arms with the words «MEMENTO MORI» and a keystone with a skull and the date 1653.
