In the new premises the monks continued to call themselves of "Santa Maria of Maniace" and have their abbots elected regularly (the last one was friar Giacomo Cimbali in 1900-1904). In Bronte they transported their objects of cult, their relics and, writes the Radice, also the Byzantine icon of Santa Maria Of Maniace (even if a writing in Latin, present on the painting, make you think that the one preserved in San Blandano could be a copy and not the original). The lodgings were completed in 1708 around the church and in 1784, as informs us an inscription inside, king Ferdinand IV, in consequence of the concession to the admiral Horatio Nelson of the ancient Maniace Abbey and all its properties, decreed the definitive transfer of the Abbey ("Ecclesia Sanctae Mariae de Maniachio regio diplomate Ferdinandi IV°, uc traslata"). The church was rebuilt from the foundations in 1821 (on the door architrave is written "Santa Maria a fundamentis quasi aedificata, anno domini 1824"). The Basilian monastery was suppressed following the laws of 1886 which sanctioned the alienation of the ecclesiastical possessions (with it had been also cancelled the female seclusion monastery of Santa Scolastica adjacent to the San Silvestro church). The monastery, at the end of the XVIII century, was demolished and changed, for a short period, to a municipal house. It doesn't exist any longer. The inside
The inside of the church, to a rectangular only nave, is marked on top by a big frame that starting from the choristers area, above the entry foyer, ends up above the major altar proposing again the motif of the façade tympanum. To the walls four niches with arches just mentioned for the minor altars. On the first to the right there is the picture showing San Giovanni Damasceno and to the left San Lorenzo left from Frazzanò, both of 1827 work by the brontese painter Giuseppe Dinaro (1795-1848). On the second altar to the right there is a glass covered wooden reliquary where are preserved the martyrs' bones. Above the major altar, inside a decoration of baroque style (draped cloth with small plaster angels in high-relief), is placed the Byzantine icon of the Madonna With The Child. The ancient origins of the church and an extensive devotion of the Brontes towards San Blandano are also demonstrated by the writings of the marriage and baptismal registers (the first mention of the church reported there is from 1693) where it appears that many were the Brontes who had the name of Blandano, nowadays it has completely disappeared and forgotten. |