The church of San Domenico, also known as the church of the Rosary, is right in the old centre of Paternò, on the east side of piazza Indipendenza. It was built in 1562 in the lower part of the town, next to the Dominican friary founded in 1524 and dedicated to Saint Thomas Aquinas, and was dedicated both to Aquinas and to Saint Dominic. After the battle of Lepanto in 1571, whose victory Pope Pius V attributed to the protection of the Madonna, it also took the title of the Most Holy Rosary; in 1574 the confraternity of the Rosary was founded, and in 1576 it built its chapel here.
What to see
From 1605 until the nineteenth century thousands of people, adults and children, were buried in the church's crypts. The friary, made a priory in 1686, was suppressed and confiscated in 1866; the church stayed open, and in 1873 received its present neoclassical façade, in blocks of white Syracuse stone, with two pairs of pilasters beside the tall portal and a crowning wall with a Baroque frieze holding the bells between two pinnacles. It became a parish church in 1922.
The interior has a single nave with a barrel vault and a raised presbytery with a semicircular apse, following the scheme of the preaching orders after the Counter-Reformation; the vault has frescoes by the contemporary painter Mario Privitera. Among the canvases, mostly eighteenth-century, are a Saint Vincent Ferrer dated 1731, a Saint Dominic surrounded by scenes from his life by the Paternò painter Carmelo Pappalardo, dated 1633, and a Saint Blaise by Vincenzo Avola; there is also a statue in wood and gesso of Saint Vincent preaching, attributable to a late eighteenth-century Neapolitan modeller.
Visiting
The church is on piazza Indipendenza, on the opposite side from the former monastery of the Santissima Annunziata. Opening hours should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
From the right you enter the seventeenth-century chapel of the Confraternity of the Child Jesus, now the sacristy: it has a wrought-iron screen, a marble altar of 1616 and on the ceiling a fresco of 1759 showing the Adoration of the Magi.
