It is one of the few churches in the world dedicated to an English saint: Marsala's cathedral honours Thomas of Canterbury, the archbishop murdered in his own cathedral and canonised in 1173. The city's mother church, the largest in Marsala, was raised — by tradition — around 1176 in the Norman age, and its consecration falls between 1173 and 1189: an almost immediate tribute to the new saint, in a Sicily bound to the Anglo-Norman crown. Today, as titular see of Lilybaeum, it also carries the title of cathedral.
What to see
The façade blends two eras: the first order is Baroque, while the second and the bell tower, finished a century later, are in a lighter barocchetto. Inside, the church is a museum of Sicilian Renaissance sculpture: among the chapels of the two aisles you find works from the Gagini workshop — from Antonello to Antonino, down to the sarcophagi of Domenico Gagini — alongside Berrettaro, Mancino and Di Battista. Many of these masterpieces, such as the Gagini tombs and Antonino Gagini's Madonna dell'Itria of 1564, came here from the demolished church of the Carmine. The plan is that of a basilica enlarged several times between 1497 and 1590, with its old Norman heart still legible around the altar.
Visiting
The dome you see is not the original: it collapsed in 1893 and the church stayed closed for about ten years; the present one was rebuilt in 1950 and restored in 2016. It is worth going in slowly and hunting, chapel by chapel, for the Gagini signatures and the tombstones and sarcophagi brought from the city's vanished churches.
Our editors' tip
Pause on Piazza della Repubblica before you go in: the cathedral dominates it with its front, and it is where a walk through the centre of Marsala begins. Inside, look for the Madonna dell'Itria of 1564: it shows just how much the Gagini workshop worked for this church.
