Mother Church in Castel di Lucio
The Mother Church of Castel di Lucio, dedicated to Maria SS. delle Grazie, is the main place of worship in the city.
The church was built in the second half of the seventeenth century on the site of a Marian temple dedicated to Santa Maria dell'Odigitria and a church dedicated to Saints Luca and Biagio: the two churches were merged and a temple with three naves in the form of a Latin cross was built. Only later were an octagonal dome and a square bell tower added. Even today it is possible to identify the remains of the wall structures of the ancient churches next to the entrance door of the main nave and in the right side nave.
The church houses numerous works of notable artistic value: a stone ciborium , in bas-relief, attributed to Gagini and carved in a single piece where there is a relief depicting the statuette of the Madonna at the top, to her right St. Paul and to the left St. Peter and under the apostles a wording in Latin ; the 17th-century wooden triptych of Christ at the column and his floggers; the Chapel of San Placido, patron saint of Castel di Lucio, with a seventeenth-century statue by an unknown author; the niche of the Immaculate Madonna with a vault finely decorated with squares with a flower inside, and the Pulpit, which amazes for its considerable size and the precision of the carvings, works by Nicolò Campo, a fine wood artist from Castellucce; the eighteenth-century Choir Choir whose peculiarity is the unusual presence of figures of dragons carved in the separators of the various stalls; a marble baptismal font dating from 1565; a seventeenth-century wooden statue of the Madonna del Rosario; two seventeenth-century canvases depicting the Souls in Purgatory and the Madonna delle Grazie; the sixteenth-century statue representing the flagellation of Christ.
