Rock Church of Santo Spirito in Scicli
The Rock Church of the Holy Spirit of Scicli , located in the upper part of the Colle di San Matteo, on the side of the Cava di Santa Maria la Nova, near the Castello dei Tre Cantoni, in an area where there are numerous hypogea from the generally collapsed front.
The first news on the existence of the church dates back to the fourteenth century, a notarial paper which highlighted the positioning of the cave with which the church bordered. With the earthquake of 1693 there was the collapse of the rocky ridge on which the rock church was dug, it was thus rebuilt in masonry at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The new construction was completed in 1747, the year engraved on a segment of the prospectus.
The church today is severely damaged, the side walls and the beautiful front with portal remain almost intact. thin columns, rostrate towards the top, fluted and rounded edges, topped by Ionic capitals. In the apse there are still traces of pictorial decoration, even if the most conspicuous traces remain on the wall in correspondence with the subsellium. Here we can distinguish four layers of frescoes: the most recent layer of which fragments remain shows the Madonna with her head tilted to the left covered by a gray veil; on the right, smaller in size, is another figure in which Blessed Guglielmo is probably to be recognized.
The crypt is located below the eighteenth-century church, communicating by means of a stepped passage carved into the rock between the apse and the back wall of the masonry church, where it opens to the right of the altar. This passage was subsequently obliterated by a masonry tampogno.
