Description
The Church of Santa Cita is a large Dominican church in the Castellammare quarter of Palermo, dedicated to Zita of Lucca. The bombs of 1943 took away its side aisles, but the apse and transept are intact and hold first-rate Renaissance and Baroque marblework.
Behind the high altar stands the Arch of Santa Cita by Antonello Gagini, from 1516: Dominican saints bent over the Scriptures, scenes from the saint's life and the Evangelists, all carved in marble. In the transept, the Chapel of the Rosary is a Baroque triumph of inlaid polychrome marble, with the Mysteries of the Rosary in high relief by Gioacchino Vitagliano after models by Giacomo Serpotta.
Today's church, consecrated in 1603, replaced the 14th-century one of the community from Lucca: many of the tombs Gagini had carved for the old church were reassembled in the new one. After the war it served as a food depot and a courtroom, before reopening in 1952 as the parish of San Mamiliano.
From the chapel of the Lanza di Trabia family, a staircase leads down to the family crypt. Here also lies Laura Lanza, the Baroness of Carini, killed at the hands of her father or her husband to punish her adultery.
Behind the high altar stands the Arch of Santa Cita by Antonello Gagini, from 1516: Dominican saints bent over the Scriptures, scenes from the saint's life and the Evangelists, all carved in marble. In the transept, the Chapel of the Rosary is a Baroque triumph of inlaid polychrome marble, with the Mysteries of the Rosary in high relief by Gioacchino Vitagliano after models by Giacomo Serpotta.
Today's church, consecrated in 1603, replaced the 14th-century one of the community from Lucca: many of the tombs Gagini had carved for the old church were reassembled in the new one. After the war it served as a food depot and a courtroom, before reopening in 1952 as the parish of San Mamiliano.
From the chapel of the Lanza di Trabia family, a staircase leads down to the family crypt. Here also lies Laura Lanza, the Baroness of Carini, killed at the hands of her father or her husband to punish her adultery.