The name of this church comes from Marseille. While it was being built, the lawyer Antonino Zappalà Spina, one of its promoters, arrived by sea in the French port and was struck by the sanctuary at the top of the promontory, whose great gilded statue of the Virgin served as a lighthouse for sailors. Back in Catania, he called his church Guardia, the watch.
What to see
In the middle of the nineteenth century the hamlet of Guardia was an arid spread of black lava. Around the eighteen seventies some of the faithful who came up here every year decided to build a church, so as to be able to carry out their religious duties in the summer months and at the same time to give a centre to a place that had none. Professor Salvatore Bruno of the University of Catania gave the land, the priest Finocchiaro and Zappalà Spina saw to the building, and the first church was circular in plan. On the day of the opening the sources do not agree: the parish remembers 10 April 1875, other texts 1 April 1874, and it is best to report both; all of them agree, on the other hand, that it was blessed by archbishop Giuseppe Benedetto Dusmet. A few years later Bruno formally donated the land by notarial deed. In the eighteen eighties the church passed to three Franciscan friars, who bought a piece of land behind it and built a friary of the Friars Minor; the building was enlarged at the beginning of the twentieth century, damaged in the Second World War and restored afterwards. Today the parish counts over seven thousand faithful.
The most important work is a portrait of the Virgin, commissioned by Zappalà Spina and painted around 1877 by Antonino Gandolfo. The attribution remained uncertain for a long time because there were five painters in the Gandolfo family, but chronology settles it. Gandolfo took Raphael's Madonna di Foligno and rewrote it as a local picture: at the Virgin's feet, among the angels, a young girl who is the newborn hamlet offering her heart to Mary; the Child hands her an anchor, sign of the steadiness of faith; on the right the little church of Guardia with the San Giovanni li Cuti cliff behind it, on the left the cathedral of Catania, and in the distance Etna, which in those days really was visible from here. But it must be said how things went: the original was destroyed during the war. What you see today is a copy, made after the destruction by the painter Emanuele Di Giovanni, a pupil of Gandolfo, who also copied other works that had been lost and painted some of the canvases of the minor altars.
Visiting
It is the main parish of the Guardia quarter, on the square of the same name, and it dominates the space with its outline. The hours follow the services and they change, so it is worth trying close to a mass. Half an hour, and it is off the routes of the centre: it makes sense if you are in the area.
Our editors' tip
Stand in front of the painting and read it as a view rather than as an altarpiece. Gandolfo put four real things into it, in a precise order: the church, the San Giovanni li Cuti cliff, the cathedral, the volcano. It is the inventory of what could be seen from this point in the eighteen seventies, when there was nothing around but lava. Then go out into the square and try to find those four points one by one, checking how much of them is still visible. It is the quickest way to measure how much city has grown here in a century and a half, and you do it with a painting instead of a map.
