Santa Maria di Betlem is one of Modica's three ancient collegiate churches, with roots in the fourteenth century, built where four small churches once stood side by side. Its façade holds a distinction: the first order, Renaissance and designed in 1571 by the Noto architect Corrado Rubino, is the only front of its kind to survive the 1693 earthquake; the neoclassical second order was added between 1816 and 1821.
What to see
The church's treasure is the Cappella Palatina, also called the Cabrera Chapel (1474-1520), a national monument: a late-Gothic jewel that escaped the quake and is set into the eighteenth-century architecture. Its entrance arch, blending Romanesque, Gothic, Sicilian Renaissance and Catalan Gothic, is among the finest things architecture produced in Sicily between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; inside the octagonal structure is venerated the statue of Santa Maria di Betlem. In the aisles two important paintings await: the Martyrdom of Saint Catherine by Michelangelo Xiavarella, of 1650, and the Saints Cosmas and Damian by Mario Minniti, a pupil of Caravaggio, of 1630. In the Nativity chapel stands a great permanent crib of 1881, with sixty-two terracotta figures from Caltagirone.
Visiting
Look at the columns inside: they still bear the marks of the flood of 26 September 1902, when the water rose to 3.43 metres above the floor. Since 2019 a small museum lets you visit the eighteenth-century oratory of the confraternity and the Cappella Palatina itself.
Our editors' tip
Take your time before the arch of the Cabrera Chapel: it is a catalogue of styles — Romanesque, Gothic, Catalan — carved in stone, and worth the visit on its own. And look on the columns for the flood plaques: they tell of another Modica, the one that has always lived with the water coming down from the hills.
