Church of Sant'Agata in Militello in Val di Catania
The Church and the former Benedictine female monastery of Sant'Agata in Militello in Val di Catania constitute an ancient religious complex of the village.
The church and the first prison were built at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The complex was used as a college for poor unmarried women. It was later sold to the nuns of the order of San Benedetto. The building was damaged by the earthquake of 1693, and was then renovated and expanded in 1695 at the behest of Prince Carlo Maria Carafa Branciforte, Marquis of Militello, who established the cloister of the Benedictine nuns there.
The carved façade, built in the late eighteenth century in neoclassical style, is incomplete. It is marked by two pairs of columns with Ionic capitals that rise up to the entablature, without decorations and with a horizontal frame, which acts as a crowning feature of the façade. In the center is the portal surmounted by a rectangular window.
The interior, with a single nave, houses the valuable seventeenth-century chapel of the high altar in polychrome stone in Mannerist style dedicated to Saint Agatha.
Given the cloistered nature of this monastery, above the entrance to the church there is a tribune characterized by the traditional jealousies, through which the nuns could attend religious functions.
Among the works kept in the church, we remember: the seventeenth-century statues of Saint Agatha and Saint Benedict; the statue with fercolo of the Madonna delle Grazie, the eighteenth-century pipe organ from the workshop of the Platania of Acireale. Valuable and ancient vestments, silverware and sacred furnishings are instead kept at the museo San Nicolò.
