The patroness of Palma di Montechiaro is Our Lady of the Rosary, celebrated on 8 September. The mother church dedicated to her was completed in 1666, atop a wide flight of steps, together with the second ducal palace of 1659 and the Benedictine monastery of 1637, the city's first building.
Palma was founded on 3 May 1637 in the barony of Montechiaro by the twin brothers Carlo and Giulio Tomasi, after Carlo obtained the licentia populandi from King Philip IV of Spain; the actual architect of the foundation, however, was the twins' powerful uncle, Mario Tomasi de Caro, captain of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Licata. The first inhabitants came from Ragusa, the Tomasi family's home town, and from Agrigento, Licata, Naro and Caltanissetta; to defend the city from attacks by Saracen pirates, Duke Carlo had a tower built dedicated to Saint Charles, and already by 1652 the town counted a considerable number of inhabitants and dwellings. The founding of Palma was part of a legitimisation campaign of the Tomasi di Lampedusa family, a nobility still poorly rooted in the Sicilian aristocracy: among its descendants is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of «The Leopard», who still owned property in the Palma area and set much of the novel's events there, only thinly disguising the name as «Donnafugata». The Benedictine monastery was strongly desired by Isabella Tomasi, the duke's daughter, who in the monastery became Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione, a celebrated mystic whose cause for beatification has been under way for years.
