Santa Maria dello Spasimo

The story

Lo Spasimo was founded in the early 16th century in the Kalsa, as a church with a monastery. Raphael was commissioned to paint Lo Spasimo di Sicilia for its high altar: the painting left Palermo in the same century and hangs today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

The church was never finished. The city’s defensive needs turned it first into a store, then into a plague hospital, a theatre, a hospital: for centuries it was everything but a church, and the roof never came.

Restored in the late 20th century, it is now a public space for concerts and performances.

Why it is worth it

It is a Gothic church with no roof: the columns rise and stop against the sky, and in summer a tree grows inside the apse. The effect is not of ruin but of an open room. You go for the silence and the shifting light, and if you arrive during a soundcheck you hear the music come off the bare walls.