The church of San Gaetano is a church in Barletta, on via Cialdini, founded in the seventeenth century by the Theatines; the complex also includes the old convent, at the side of the church.
What to see
The interior has six side chapels, three on each side, communicating with one another and separated by round arches; the walls are white and the floor is of terracotta tiles. In the second chapel on the left, on a fine wooden altar painted to look like marble, is kept the relic of the Holy Thorn, which is displayed and celebrated on the fifth Sunday of Lent. At the end of the central nave a large chapel encloses the high altar, surrounded by a semicircular wall, with five seventeenth-century canvases on the life and deeds of Saint Cajetan; on the walls of the presbytery two large canvases, the Dream of Saint Joseph and the Flight into Egypt, were first attributed to Altobello and then to Paolo De Matteis. In the first chapel on the right is a canvas attributed to Cesare Fracanzano, showing the Virgin between her parents Saint Joachim and Saint Anne. From the third chapel a trapdoor leads to the old burials, and from the last chapel on the right one enters the sacristy, whose vault is carried on pointed arches and is called, for its shape, a «volta bastarda». In 2013 the façade was embellished with a marble sculpture, the Ecce Homo by the Veronese sculptor Matteo Faben.
The Theatines, present in Barletta from the end of the sixteenth century, first officiated in the small church of San Giuseppe, which already stood in the complex; in the spring of 1656 they began work on a new church beside the original building, suspended for two years because of the plague and finished in 1667, the year in which church and convent took their present name. With the suppression of the order, decreed by Murat on 7 September 1809, the church passed to the parish priest of San Giacomo, who entrusted it to the confraternity of the Santissima Trinità, expelled in their turn from their own church after the suppression of the Celestine Fathers; they brought with them the relic of the Holy Thorn, of which they were custodians and which they had to celebrate solemnly on Passion Sunday. The building was granted to the municipality and used for public offices.
Visiting
The church is on via Cialdini, a street with numerous conventual buildings, such as San Ruggero, Santa Maria della Vittoria and the Monte di Pietà. The sources consulted give no opening hours: these should be checked; the Holy Thorn, according to the sources, is displayed on the fifth Sunday of Lent.
Our editors' tip
On the same via Cialdini is also Palazzo della Marra, home of the Pinacoteca De Nittis: two stops on the same street.
