The church of Santa Maria della Stella, originally Santa Maria della Misericordia, is now an abandoned ruin in the old San Vito quarter, also called the fountain quarter, in Alcamo. According to a seventeenth-century inscription it was built before 1130, when the settlement of Alcamo was spreading north. In 1221 it was enlarged by the ancestors of the De Ballis, Comes, Gentilis and Maurici families, and in May 1313, on Ascension Day, the bishop of Mazara Gotofredo Roncione consecrated it as Alcamo's mother church. It lost that role in 1402, when the new mother church of the Assumption, further south, was finished.
What to see
Of the old building only the doorway remains, in travertine-like calcarenite, with a pointed arch in Gothic-Chiaramonte style. According to a notarial deed of 1582 the first doorway dated from the early fourteenth century; the church then passed to the Diana family, who replaced it with the present one, which is why the Diana arms appear at the top of one of the capitals. Today's doorway would therefore date from between the second half of the fourteenth and the early fifteenth century.
In the fifteenth century the Comes and Gentiles families gave the Dominicans the adjoining land for a convent with a garden and orchard. In 1660 the friars left it for the new convent of the Rosary, and in 1706 the Jesuits turned it into a house for spiritual exercises for 40 people, which the people of Alcamo called il Ritiro.
Visiting
The church is completely abandoned and its remains can be seen from outside. The works it held are now in other churches in town.
Our editors' tip
The fresco of the Madonna della Stella, attributed by Gioacchino Di Marzo to Tommaso De Vigilia, was moved in 1661 with its whole wall to the church of the Rosary, where it still is; the Madonna del Miele, attributed to Barnaba da Modena, is instead in the church of Santi Paolo e Bartolomeo.
