Convent and Crypt of Capuchins in Savoca
The Convent and Church of the Capuchins in Savoca is a monumental religious complex that stands on a hill that dominates the town center and the valleys that surround it. In the basement of the small square in front of the convent church there is the Crypt of the Capuchins of Savoca.
It was built between 1603 and 1614, by the general father Lorenzo da Brindisi and the provincial father Girolamo from Polizzi. The convent constituted a point of reference for the humanistic, scientific and legal education of the privileged few who had the opportunity to study in those years.
The convent consists of two floors above ground : on the ground floor there are the library, the refectory and the kitchen; the twenty cells of the friars are located on the first floor. Originally the library housed an immense literary heritage, which has now been lost. However, you can admire some frescoes by friar Gaetano La Rosa from 1608. Next to the convent there was a large vegetable garden that was cultivated and contributed to the sustenance of the friars, which has now become a municipal park.
> The church attached to the convent's convent is dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi.
The simple gabled façade, with a slightly overhanging pediment, has a single stone portal surmounted by a rectangular window .
The interior, with a single nave, preserves two valuable altars in marble and wood.
Among the works kept in the church, of great artistic and historical value, are: the oil canvas of the Madonna of Loreto, commissioned by the noble Trimarchi family from Savoca in the first half of the sixteenth century, and attributed to Antonino Giuffré; the canvas of the Madonna and Child among the angels with Saint Francis and Saint Clare, painted by Domenico Guargena in 1661, which represents the Madonna with the baby Jesus in her arms blessing the city of Savoca. This canvas, placed on the main altar, is particular because it shows the urban structure of the historic center of Savoca in the 17th century; the oil painting of the Vision of Fra' Felice da Cantalice by Ludovico Svirech from 1755; the paintings of Saints Anna and Joachim visiting Mary from 1637, a cenacle from 1634, and the Virgin of the Angels, works by Friar Umile from Messina; a valuable seventeenth-century figurine depicting Santa Maria Bambina.
Inside the church there are five tombs: one as a sarcophagus in which the Messina industrialist Antonino Russo Gatto (1809-1868) is buried, and four at floor level which belong to the notable Savocese families of the Trimarchi, Scarcella and Prestipino.
The Crypt of the Capuchins was built at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the subsoil of the small square in front of the convent church.
It contains 37 mummified corpses belonging to patricians, lawyers, notaries, landowners, priests, monks, abbots, doctors, poets, magistrates, a noblewoman and three children, mostly part of the rich and powerful Savoce aristocracy . The bodies are dressed in very elegant period clothing and are displayed in the niches and coffins in which they are enclosed.
The oldest mummy, still elegantly dressed according to the fashion of the time, dates back to 1776, and belongs to the notary Pietro Salvadore (1708-1776), the most recent is from 1876 and belongs to the Priest Don Giuseppe Trischitta (1812-1876).
The mummification process lasted sixty days and consisted of immersing the body in a solution for two days of salt and vinegar and, subsequently, the viscera were drained into the crypt-putridarium of the mother church where, taking advantage of the play of air currents, the natural drying of the corpse took place. Finally, the mummy was elegantly dressed and proceeded to be solemnly transferred to the crypt.
