The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Cerignola is a fourteenth-century country church in the town's territory, in contrada San Martino.
What to see
It was built by Lorenzo and Goffredo Lupis, who had fled Giovinazzo in 1382. It is also known as the «church of the Eternal Father», because of its many images of this subject, and as the «Incoronatella», from the side chapel built in 1785 by the Battaglino family and consecrated to the Madonna dell'Incoronata, venerated in the sanctuary of the village of that name near Foggia. The exterior has a plain façade, with two windows at the top and a portal with a Gothic arch, on whose lunette the Eternal Father is painted; the entrance is below street level, reached by three steps. The bell tower is very simple, with a bell of 1904, and at the far end is a small semicircular apse.
Inside, to the right of the entrance, a passage with a polycentric arch leads to the chapel of the Incoronata, with an altar of Lecce stone bearing the Battaglino coat of arms and, in a niche, a canvas of the Virgin Incoronata signed «Francisci Battaglini quond(am) Hjacinti 1784»; on the left are the eighteenth-century altar of the Virgin of the Graces and, in a niche, a fifteenth-century wooden statue of the Madonna. In the presbytery the cross vault has two ribs that end about two metres above the floor with two allegorical images, two hands and two tortoises, and at the crossing a masonry sphere with the inscription «Ave Maria». There are many traces of frescoes, in particular fifteenth-century ones: on the triumphal arch the Risen Christ, on the right side of the presbytery Saint Lucy, Saint Vitus and Saint Leonard and on the left the Virgin of the Graces in the centre, and in the apse a Madonna of the Graces with the Apostles.
Visiting
The church is in contrada San Martino, in the countryside of Cerignola. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check them.
Our editors' tip
Three graffiti are preserved in the church: one of 1503 recalls the battle of Cerignola between the French and the Spanish, because the lifeless body of the French commander Louis d'Armagnac, duke of Nemours, was brought here; another, of 1591, the replacement of the old doors; the last, of 1691, an earthquake and a plague epidemic.
