The Battle of Milazzo on 20 July 1860, fought during Garibaldi's campaign to free Sicily, left the town's old cathedral badly damaged and looted, and Milazzo found itself without its mother church. The answer came decades later, on Piazza Duomo: a new building designed by the architect Francesco Valenti, partly reworked by the engineers Mario Pagano and Giovanni Crinò, raised on the site of the eighteenth-century municipal theatre and the former church of the Addolorata. The Duomo of Santo Stefano protomartire, the largest church in Milazzo, was inaugurated on 27 December 1953.
What to see
The interior gathers a wealth of works largely rescued from the old cathedral. On the neoclassical marble high altar of the late eighteenth century stands the wooden statue of Santo Stefano protomartire, carved in 1784 by Filippo Quattrocchi of Gangi and made in Palermo with the painter Marcello Parigi. Flanking it are two altarpieces by Antonello de Saliba dated 1531, showing Saint Peter and Saint Paul; the latter bears the artist's own signature in its scroll, “1531 Eu Mastru Antonellu Resaliba pinsit”. The same master left an Adoration of the Child in the presbytery, together with two small panels of Saint Roch and Saint Thomas Aquinas, while Antonino Giuffrè contributed a Saint Nicholas with scenes from his life and an Annunciation, both sixteenth-century. The right transept holds two canvases by Scipione Manni, an Adoration of the Magi of 1755 and a Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian of 1753; the left one keeps Deodato Guinaccia's Nativity of 1573 and a fifteenth-century Renaissance baptismal font from the old mother church of Santa Maria. In the central nave the coffered polychrome ceiling carries two frescoes with episodes from the life of the protomartyr and eight medallions of saints tied to the town. Look too for the sixteenth-century holy water stoup of the Gagini school and, in the treasury, the 1688 reliquary in silver and gilt silver by the Messina goldsmiths Giuseppe and Nicola Provenzano.
Visiting
Many pieces tell the story of the town's devotion. The relics of Santo Stefano, found in 1461 and recognised in 1481, led the people and clergy to make him patron of Milazzo in 1521; the feast recalls 3 August 1461, the day the holy Arm was discovered. Alongside the de Saliba masterpieces, the old cathedral survives here in the large canvas commissioned by the town jurors in 1622 and in the Martyrdom of Santo Stefano painted in 1729 by Letterio Paladino.
Our editors' tip
It is worth reading these works against the church that came before them: nearly all the finest paintings and sculptures arrived from the old cathedral, in the Castle quarter. Seeing both buildings, the new one on Piazza Duomo and the old one on the height above, tells the full religious history of Milazzo.
