Duomo di Piazza Armesina

The monumental Baroque building, crowned with a great dome, towers over its own piazza, an open space which is also overlooked by the Baroque Palazzo Trigona.

The current church was built on the 15th century foundations of another church, from which a bell-tower survives down the right side, with Catalan-Gothic windows on the two lower levels and Renaissance equivalents above. The front elevation comprises a broad façade ornamented with pilasters and engaged columns; a sandstone string-course articulates the horizontal planes balancing the important emphasis given to the elegant central doorway. This is framed by spiral columns, surmounted by a single wide, square window, with the eagle above, the heraldic emblem of the Trigona family who originally commissioned the church. A number of notable works of art is preserved inside. On the right, the baptismal font stands through a Gagini-style Renaissance archway. Above the main altar, at the far end of the nave, sits the Madonna delle Vittorie, the Byzantine image which is popularly linked to the banner given by Pope Nicholas II to his legate Roger I at the council of Melfi, which was the capital of the Norman Kingdom of Puglia. The little chapel to the left of the chancel is a fine painted wooden cross from 1455, with the Resurrection depicted on the back. Overlooking the nave there are two gilded wooden organ cases: one ornamented with a medallion enclosing the Trinacria, the ancient symbol of Sicily (on the left), the other bearing Count Roger on horseback (on the right).