Madonna Annunziata Sanctuary

The oratory exterior is not very significant as it is dominated by the Sanctuary's majestic prospect to which gets confused and integrated.

It is enough to go through the small door to find yourself in a delicious spot: a little church simple and linear, rich of documentations and works of art, demonstration of the deep religious feelings that once animate the confraternities life.

Particularly interesting the frescos covering the walls that B. Radice stran­gely defines “grossolani” (coarse).

Nearly all of them are work of local artists and portray figures of saints. In a corner below are portrayed the features of some confraternity’s treasures that ordered the paintings at their own expense. Hardly known and protected they are irremediably disappearing and need some protection and an urgent restoration.

On the internal part of the door can be read: "Aedicula sumptibus sodalium Jesu et Mariae excitata, anno Dom. 1792, ut in tabulis D. Cesarii Cannata, die 25 Januari 1801".

Above is the year of the little church decoration. In 1880 in the Oratory lived the PP.Minoriti.

Here on we shall document some of the little church’s frescos.
 

San Francesco Saverio and (below to the right) the treasurer Illuminato Giarrizzo’s portrai

San Filippo Neri confessing San Camillo; and further down the treasurer Giuseppe Gatto’s portrait

San Giuseppe, from whom two streaks of light radiate the world, and San Giovanni Nepomu­ceno, martyr of the sacramental seal, and below the treasurer Antonio Coco’s portrait. The state of the frescos is at its worst. If we don’t want to completely cancel these precious testimonies some urgent restoration work is necessary.

A curiosity reported by Benedetto Radice

The Bronte’s historian writes that in 1700 next to the Oratory had to be erected a scholastic institute but, due to economic difficulties, and to the fact that the clergy had become more greedy and less generous, the all thing was called off.

Here is what B. Radice wrote: «In the first year of the XVIII century the clergy, having decayed the files with the Scooper, (and I never came to know why), turned to the fathers of the order of minor, regular clergymen’s congre­gation and, on the 21st of January 1701, with an act pre­pa­red by the notary Giuseppe Chirone, the archpriest don Giuseppe Papotto, in the name of the clergy, handed over to father Tommaso Schiros, of the minor fathers, the church of the Annunciate and its administration to build adjacent to the Jesus and Mary congregation’s little church, an education school, at his expense on condition of getting the necessary income to maintain studies of grammar, philosophy and theology.