This convent ended twice, in two different ways. The first in 1866, when the state suppressed the religious orders and the Capuchin hospice of Villarosa closed by law. The second in 1978, when it closed on its own, for want of vocations. Today it is a ruin.
What to see
Between the two closures lies the story of one man. Father Felice Pirello, a Capuchin born at Villarosa, after serving as provincial minister and then general councillor of the Order, retired to the convent of Calascibetta and set his mind on bringing the friars back to his own town. He managed it: in 1886 the Capuchins bought land in contrada Acquanova.
The works finished two years later, and at the beginning of 1889 the convent was canonically erected and the church dedicated to the Madonna delle Grazie. In the mid twentieth century, when the friars were already few, the building was used as an orphanage for some fifteen years. Then silence.
Visiting
The remains are at Villarosa, in the province of Enna, in the heart of Sicily; it is an abandoned ruin, so you look at it from outside and do not go in. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the size of it. A small town of the Sicilian interior built, at the end of the nineteenth century, a complex designed for a community of friars, with the church, the lodgings and the common rooms. A century later there were not enough people willing to move in. It was not a law that closed it the second time: it was arithmetic.