Church of San Francesco in Monforte San Giorgio
The Church of San Francesco in Monforte San Giorgio and the adjoining convent of the Order of Minims are an important religious complex in the village.
They were built at the behest of the sisters Agata and Girolama Pollicino. The church was built starting from 1719 and completed in 1735. An important expansion dates back to the first half of the eighteenth century, carried out thanks to the bequest of the sac. Francesco Vitagliano.
The church has a simple gabled façade, delimited by two corner pilasters, and has a stone portal surmounted by a broken tympanum supported by brackets with leaf decorations.
The interior, with a single nave, features various stucco decorations and five altars decorated with polychrome inlays.
Among the works kept inside the church, of particular value are: canvas depicting San Francesco di Paola surrounded by angels, a work by Onofrio Gabrielli from 1678; the seventeenth-century canvas of San Francesco di Paola leaning on his long stick; the two stoups, one with a stem, from the seventeenth century, which has a structure lightened by facets and moldings, and one on the wall, probably dating back to the first decades of the seventeenth century, formed by a semicircular basin supported by a hand and decorated with a central relief which depicts the visit of the three Angels to Abraham.
The Pauline convent housed a very rich collection of sacred parameters dating back to the centuries. XVII, XVIII, XIX, a good part of which is today preserved in the treasury of the Mother Church. The convent had its own cistern, the largest in the town.
The church and the convent are now the property of the municipality. In the 1920s, a mechanical clock with three bells that mark the hours was installed next to the church bell tower.
