Church of San Francesco in Castelbuono
The Church of San Francesco di Castelbuono is part of a monumental complex consisting of the former convent, the sixteenth-century cloister and the octagonal chapel of Sant'Antonio di Padova.
The church has a hall with four side altars. Among the works kept inside the church, noteworthy are: the main altarpiece, depicting the Triumph of Mary Immaculate, set in a large stucco drape; the fourteenth-century fresco of Santa Maria di Bisanzio, the doors of the Venetian school organ from 1547; the marble simulacrum of the Madonna and Child from 1528; a Byzantine fresco of the '300.
Adjacent to the church is the beautiful eighteenth-century cloister. A magnificent marble portal attributed to the school of Francesco Laurana, which incorporates the twisted columns that mark the internal corners, dating back to the second half of the 15th century, gives access to the Chapel dedicated to St. Anthony. It is an octagonal grandstand where the remains of the members of the Ventimiglia family were housed, starting with the fifteenth century mausoleum of Giovanni Ventimiglia. The late-Romanesque mausoleum contains the monumental baroque sarcophagus of Francesco Rodrigo Ventimiglia, two other sixteenth-century sarcophagi and the funerary epigraph of Giovanni I Ventimiglia, first marquis of Sicily, who died in Castelbuono in 1475. The chapel of Sant'Antonio stands in the place where, according to tradition, the Paduan saint stopped to pray in 1222.
