In 1520 a community of Genoese merchants living in Sciacca had a chapel to Saint George raised beside the monastery of San Francesco d'Assisi. It stood for more than four centuries, until in 1952 a wave of property speculation tore it down to make room for an apartment block. What survives is the name of a city district and a handful of fragments, some still half-buried in the ground.
What to see
The sixteenth-century front was unusually refined: a single-pitched roof, a richly carved Catalan-style portal and an oculus framed by concentric moulded rings, crowned by a slender blind ogival window set against a band of hanging arches. Inside, a single altar held a painting of Saint George and the dragon by an unknown hand, now lost. The walls were faced with maiolica tiles showing scenes from the Bible, signed by one Maxierato; rescued before demolition, they are kept at the Istituto Statale d'Arte. The Genoese merchants were buried here, among them young Francesco Russo, who died in 1588, and Augusto Cunneo of Savona, who died in 1572, whose sarcophagus also survived along with fragments of a tomb bearing the arms of the Tagliavia family.
Visiting
The chapel is gone. It once stood at the corner of Via Figuli and Via Agatocle, north of the church, beyond the walls and facing the old Porta Bagni, in the quarter of the local tile-makers known as “quartarari.” A multi-storey building now occupies its footprint, and only a few remains can be seen, partly emerging from the earth. The surviving pieces — Maxierato's tiles, the Cunneo sarcophagus and the Tagliavia fragments — are on view instead at the Istituto Statale d'Arte, where they were taken to safety.
Our editors' tip
To grasp what Sciacca lost, head for the Istituto Statale d'Arte: Maxierato's biblical tiles and the fragments of the Genoese tombs are all that is left of a community that gave its name to an entire neighbourhood. A look at the corner of Via Figuli and Via Agatocle rounds out the story, between what once stood there and what stands there now.
