Photo gallery
Information
The sacred building was designed by Pierre D'Angicourt and built in the fourteenth century on the initiative of Charles II of Anjou, which led the city to Christianity, after the long Arab-Muslim period.
The church has a rigorous and slender masonry facade, whose sobriety is interrupted only by a beautiful portal, whose arch, decorated with sculptural elements and the Angevin coat of arms, is supported by thin linear and twisted columns; and a splendid 16-ray stone rose window rebuilt in 1943.
The single nave interior, very high and with a wooden trussed ceiling, is illuminated by 4 single-lancet windows; the perimeter walls report to the top traces of eighteenth-century frescoes that narrate episodes of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. The polygonal apse, separated from the nave by an arch of 18 meters, is frescoed with stories of the Passion and illuminated by three high single-lancet windows; below the large single-lancet window on the right is a Flamboyant Gothic mullioned window that frames an Annunciation of 1300. Among the decorative elements are the five (up to 1942 there were 8) altars of baroque taste and sandstone wanted by San Francesco Fasani, each surmounted by valuable wooden statues (Saint Francis and the Immaculate Conception by Giacomo Colombo; the Ecce Homo; the Crucified Jesus; Saint Anthony of Padua) and the Renaissance pulpit, adaptation of a noble sarcophagus.
Under the high altar are the relics of Father Maestro, San Francesco Antonio Fasani, first saint of the Capitanata, canonized on April 13, 1986 by Pope John Paul II; the miracles of the Saint of the poor, of the outcasts and of the prisoners, that lived here for 35 years are narrated by two canvases.
Through a door on the left wall of the nave leads to the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows where there are statues of the Dead Christ, the Virgin of Sorrows and the same Saint Francis Antonio Fasani, as well as a canvas depicting the Deposition from the Cross.
Connected to the sanctuary is the convent of the Conventual Friars Minor, where you can visit the cell of San Francesco Antonio Fasani.