This oratory keeps itself, and has done for three centuries. When the earthquake of 1726 damaged it, the confraternity did not stop at repairs: on the ground behind, until then a garden, it put up houses to let, so that the rents would pay for the works and for future upkeep. A few decades later it added more.
What to see
The confraternity of Saint Stephen had been founded in 1580 and had its seat in the church of that name on the piano della Panneria. Having obtained a piece of land from the city government, it bought an adjoining one at the start of the seventeenth century to build the oratory. The repairs after the earthquake were overseen by the architect Francesco Firrigno, and the new houses of the eighteenth century by Mariano Sucameli. In the nineteenth century came a carved and gilded altar; then damp infiltration, the rebuilding of the roof in the early twentieth century, further routine maintenance. It is the biography of a small building held up by a group of people who, generation after generation, went on finding the money.
The front is plain, with pilasters and a portal that keeps its eighteenth-century wooden door. You enter a vestibule with a barrel vault, and from there two doors lead into the single nave. The walls have Doric pilasters painted as false marble; the lunetted barrel vault is of reed and plaster, frescoed with stories of the saint's life, and the same light technique carries the dome over the sanctuary. On the altar are two statues attributed to Giacomo Serpotta, and in the hall the stuccoes of Procopio and Giovanni Maria Serpotta. The seventeenth-century canvases attributed to the Genoese Bernardo Castello and his workshop, which were the heart of the painted decoration, are today at the Diocesan Museum: what remains here is the stucco, the frescoes and the sacristy with its painted wooden ceiling.
Visiting
It stands in piazza del Monte di Pietà. Like almost all the oratories of Palermo it has no continuous opening: you get in on organised visits or through the associations that look after it, so it must be checked first. Know that the paintings are gone, and that what you come to see is the work of the Serpotta. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Look at the steps in front of the door and at the carved bases of the pilasters. Those steps were not the architect's idea: in 1866 the level of the street in front of the oratory was lowered, and the entrance found itself hanging above the new level, so steps were needed to get back down to the ground. It is a visible measure of how far the city sank at this point, and it can be read in two seconds if you know what you are looking at.
