Of this church three walls remain, and for generations the feast went on all the same, around the ruin. It was the first Sunday of September, in contrada Sant'Anna: tables with roast sausages and wine in the courtyard of the palace, the palio race, the band, the games, and meanwhile the religious service inside a church that was already falling down.
What to see
The little church was built in 1676, three kilometres south of Villarosa, and today is reduced to a few outer walls. The sacred image venerated there was not lost: it was taken to the church of San Giacomo, in the town, and there it still is, together with the statue of the saint.
The poet Vincenzo De Simone described that feast as an occasion on which people drowned a year's troubles in an hour of drunkenness, and spoke of it as a bacchanal with music, dancing and libations. Until the nineteen-forties, however, people also came here for a much more serious reason: they made the procession to ask for rain.
Visiting
The remains are in contrada Sant'Anna, in open country south of Villarosa, in the province of Enna; it is a ruin, with no ticket and no hours, and you do not go inside. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at where it stands: three kilometres out of town, in the middle of the fields. It is not a planning oversight, it is the function. A country church served the country, and people walked out to it in procession to ask for water for the wheat. It is an insurance policy on the harvest, and that is why it was built far from everybody and close to everything that counted.