The church of Sant'Angelo in Licata carries the name of the Jesuit and Baroque architect Angelo Italia, born in the town in 1628: its construction, dated 1653, was the first work he signed as an architect. The building reached its present form in 1752, with the involvement of the architect Giovanni Biagio Amico, and on 5 May 2010 the archbishop of Agrigento, Francesco Montenegro, raised it to the rank of sanctuary.
What to see
The plan is basilican, a Latin cross with three naves separated by columns of Billiemi stone. The devotional heart of the building sits in the right nave: the miraculous well where, according to tradition, the relics of Sant'Angelo were found, closed off by an octagonal balustrade carved in 1673 by the Trapani marble-worker Giovanni Romano for baron Francesco Vincenzo Buglio. A little further on, the altar of the Deposition holds the painting of the same subject by Gioacchino Martorana, dated 1778. The left nave lines up older altars: the Ecce Homo, an oil on canvas by an unknown Sicilian painter of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and the Madonna della Lettera, by a seventeenth-century Sicilian hand. The left transept opens onto the Cappellone di Sant'Angelo Carmelitano, enclosed by a wrought-iron screen designed by Angelo Italia himself. The apse is dominated by a monumental marble structure with paired Ionic columns and a broken pediment, framing the statue of Sant'Angelo Carmelitano brought here from the old Carmelite church of Acireale; to either side hang the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century canvases of the saint's Martyrdom and Mystic Ecstasy.
Visiting
The side aisles hold the four great processional structures, the ceremonial candles known as “'ntorci”, which stand for the titles of Sant'Angelo: Doctor, Confessor, Virgin and Martyr. After an accident in 1999 and the long interruption that followed, since 2012 the original machines have been paired with lighter reproductions, so that both versions can now be seen. Along the walls stand the marble cenotaphs and sarcophagi of several Licata noble families, among them those of the marquis Gerolamo Frangipane (1758) and the marquis Domenico Cannada (1762). Since 1 March 2020 the sanctuary and its adjoining convent have been entrusted to an international Carmelite community.
Our editors' tip
In the right nave, look for the octagonal balustrade of 1673: it rings the well from which local devotion traces the saint's cult, and it is where the story of the church and that of Licata overlap. From there the meaning of the processional structures kept a few steps away comes into focus.